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Thread: Alice Guy-Blaché

  1. #1
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    Alice Guy-Blaché

    Alice Guy-Blaché (July 1, 1873 - March 24, 1968) was a pioneer filmmaker who was the first female director in the motion picture industry and is considered to be one of the first directors of a fiction film.

    Alice Guy was born to French parents who were working in Chile where her father owned a chain of bookstores. Her mother returned home to give birth to Alice in Paris. For the first few years of her life she was left in the care of her grandmother in Switzerland until her mother came to take her to Chile where she lived with her family for about two years. She was then sent to study at a boarding school in France and was a young girl entering her teens when her parents returned from Chile. However, shortly thereafter, her father and brother both died.

    In 1894 Alice Guy was hired by Léon Gaumont to work for a still-photography company as a secretary. The company soon went out of business but Gaumont bought the defunct operations inventory and began his own company that soon became a major force in the fledgling motion picture industry in France. Alice Guy decided to join the new Gaumont Film Company, a decision that led to a pioneering career in filmmaking spanning more than twenty-five years and involving her directing, producing, writing and/or overseeing more than 700 films.

    From 1897 to 1906, Alice Guy was Gaumont's head of production and is generally considered to be the first filmmaker to systematically develop narrative filmmaking. In 1906, she made her first full length feature film, titled The Life of Christ, a big budget production for the time, which included 300 extras. That same year she also made the film La Fée Printemps (The Spring Fairy), one of the first movies ever to be shot in color. As well, she pioneered the use of recordings in conjunction with the images on screen in Gaumont's "Chronophone" system, which used a vertical-cut disc synchronized to the film. An innovator, she employed special effects, using double exposure masking techniques and even running a film backwards.

    In 1907 Alice Guy married Herbert Blaché who was soon appointed the production manager for Gaumont's operations in the United States. After working with her husband for Gaumont in the USA, the two struck out on their own in 1910, partnering with George A. Magie in the formation of The Solax Company, the largest pre-Hollywood studio in America.

    Alice Guy and her husband divorced several years later, and with the decline of the East Coast film industry in favour of the more hospitable and cost effective climate in Hollywood, their film partnership also ended.
    Following her separation, and after Solax ceased production, Alice Guy-Blaché went to work for William Randolph Hearst's International Film Service. She returned to France in 1922 and although she never made another film, for the next 30 years she gave lectures on film and wrote novels from film scripts. All but forgotten for decades, in 1953 the government of France awarded her the Legion of Honor.

    Alice Guy-Blaché never remarried and in 1964 she returned to the United States to stay with one of her daughters. She died in a nursing home in Mahwah, New Jersey.
    Last edited by Serendipity09; 07-23-2009 at 01:16 AM.


  2. #2
    Vamp Guest
    Fascinating. I read somewhere that there were more female directors in silent era than in any time other than our own.

  3. #3
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    The first woman film director, was in France, Alice Guy, she directed La Fee aux choux, about a young couple walking in the countryside who encounter a fairy in the cabbage patch and are presented with a child. Despite her long experience, she was unable to find work as a director in her own country and ended up making a living writing stories based on film senarios for pulp magazines.

    The first feature film directed by a woman, Lois Weber, was the 1914 production of The Merchant of Venice. Her best known picture was Universal's highly successful Where Are My Children, 1916, a treatise on birth control. Her last picture, White Heat, 1934, about miscegenation, was not released.

    There were 36 women directors active in the US during the silent era. The only one to make the transition to sound was Dorothy Arzner, whose Manhattan Cocktail 1928 was the first talkie directed by a woman.


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