Guy, Alice

Alice Guy

French filmmaker Alice Guy (1873–1968) was the first woman to make a movie, as well as one of the very first directors in the history of cinema to work with a script.

Her short film from 1896, La Fée aux choux (The Cabbage Fairy), which was one minute in length, is thought to have been only the second piece of cinema to depict a fictional tale. Over the next 20 years, Guy made hundreds of other short films, but many of them have been lost to time. Only later in her career did she gain recognition as a film pioneer and as the first of her gender to attain success.

Guy was born on July 1, 1873, in Saint-Mandé, a section of Paris, France. Her parents were bookstore owners in Chile, but her mother had sailed back to France to give birth, and then deposited her daughter in the care of a grandmother in Switzerland and returned to Chile. For a time, Guy lived with her parents in South America, and at the age of six entered a parochial school for girls, Convent du Sacré-Coeur, in Viry, France. After another stint at a school in Ferney, she headed to Paris to learn a skill so that she could support herself.

Quickly Learned New Technology

Guy took classes in stenography, a form of shorthand writing that was a necessary job requirement for a secretary at the time. In 1895, the year she turned 22, Guy was hired as the secretary to Léon Gaumont. He was a talented mechanical engineer and was working for a camera manufacturer at the time, but was fascinated by the new form of "moving" pictures. When his employer's company ran into financial trouble, Gaumont and a few others—including Gustav Eiffel, for whom the Eiffel Tower was named—bought the company and formed a new company they called L. Gaumont et Cie. The firm began manufacturing the equipment to make motion pictures, and began making short films to promote their product.

The first notable motion picture recorder was the Kinetograph, designed by American inventor Thomas Edison, which came onto the market in 1894 and was widely copied elsewhere. In France, two brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, entered the field in 1895 with their cinématographe, which was both a camera and projector. They briefly pursued the commercial possibilities, making dozens of short films that were shown in arcades to the paying public. By 1897, a magician named Georges Méliès was making films with a rooftop backdrop in Montreuil, just outside of Paris. Méliès used actors who performed in front of what were essentially stage sets.

In between the first films of Lumière and Méliès, Guy made a short film, La Fée aux choux (The Cabbage Fairy). It is just 60 seconds long, and she appears in it dressed as a man. It came after the Lumière brothers' L'Arroseur arrosé, first screened in December of 1895 and believed to be the first narrative, or non-documentary film. Film historians believe Guy shot The Cabbage Fairy in April of 1896, and Méliès made his first film within a month or two after that. Record keeping from this earliest era of filmmaking was imprecise, and there are debates over which of the pioneers were first in the industry with various camera and editing devices that later became standard.

Became Head of Production

Gaumont liked Guy's efforts so much that he put her in charge of production at his newly created film division by 1897. For the next few years, she made dozens of very short films, most averaging just 75 feet in length. She also worked on some of the first motion pictures that featured sound. This innovation, which occurred around 1900, came thanks to the Chronophone, designed by Gaumont and his engineers. It twinned the film projector with sound from a wax cylinder recording.

Within a decade, Gaumont's company had become the number-two filmmaker in France, just after Pathé, and began to own and operate its own movie theaters. They showed Guy's first full-length feature film, La Vie du Christ (The Life of Christ), in 1906. It was shot in 25 scenes at great expense, including payroll for 300 extras. She also made La Fée Printemps (The Spring Fairy), which used some rudimentary color special effects, that same year.

Technological advances and the success of Etablissements Gaumont, as the company was known after 1906, allowed Guy to make longer and more elaborate feature films. She wrote her own scripts, and her cast included clowns, acrobats, and opera singers who took roles in fanciful stories she based on fairy tales, folklore, or the Bible. Though she was not the first person to make a feature film, film historians have credited her with two technical innovations, each of which came by accident—running the film in reverse, and the double exposure.

Moved to United States

In 1906 Guy was working with another prolific director at Gaumont, Louis Feuillade, on a short titled Mireille when she met Herbert Blaché, who headed distribution for Gaumont in Britain and Germany. They were wed the following year, and Herbert Blaché was made head of a newly created Gaumont subsidiary for distribution in U.S. theaters. The newlyweds moved to the United States, and Guy had two daughters while serving as production manager and living in the New York City area. In 1910 she and her husband, along with a third Gaumont executive, founded their own company, Solax.

Guy's first American film credit was A Child's Sacrifice in 1910, which was also the first film released by Solax. Their company was based in Flushing, New York, and its studio and production facility made some 325 films over the next few years. Herbert Blaché usually served as the pro duction manager and cinematographer, while Guy was the artistic director. Titles from these years include The Violin Maker of Nuremberg from 1911, and Fra Diavolo and Mignon, both from 1912 and based on operas; they were shown in theaters with live orchestral accompaniment. In 1912 Guy directed A Fool and His Money, believed to be the first motion picture filmed with an entirely African-American cast, and later preserved at the American Film Institute archives.

Solax was so successful that Guy and her husband moved to a massive new studio in which they had invested $100,000—an enormous sum at the time-in Fort Lee, New Jersey. This was rapidly becoming the film capital of America, and nearly all the major studios making pictures in the pre-World War I era were based in or around the city, before the possibility of year-round outdoor shooting lured them to Southern California's warmer climate. A company called Metro Pictures was launched in 1916 as a distributor of Solax films, but one of its founders, Louis B. Mayer, launched his own production company, which became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or MGM, one of the major entertainment industry players of the twentieth century.

Guy was well-known in the industry during this era, and an article about her accomplishments appeared in the March 1912 issue of Photoplay. She wrote an article titled, "Woman's Place in Photoplay Production" for The Moving Picture World in its edition of July 11, 1914. She also taught some of the first courses in filmmaking at Columbia University in 1917.

Studio Went Under

Guy continued to make films, including Her Great Adventure, released in 1918. Its plot concerns a Broadway hopeful who becomes an overnight sensation, dates a movie star, and finally reunites with the humble chorus boy who was her first love. But after World War I, there were many changes in the film industry in the United States, and a period of consolidation began. Some suffered financial setbacks, and Solax was one of them. Guy and her husband were forced to rent their Fort Lee property to others, then finally sell it.

The 1920 film Tarnished Reputations would be the last film that Guy ever directed. By this time she and her husband were working under contract to other studios, including Pathé, where Tarnished Reputations originated. The story revolves around a naïve young woman from the countryside, whose portrait is painted by an artist passing through; she falls in love with him, the townspeople gossip about their relationship, and when the painting sells and makes the artist famous, she never hears from him again. She follows him to the city, is mistaken for a prostitute and arrested on a morals charge, and ends up in a reformatory for teenaged girls. Eventually she meets a writer, who casts her in his play, and in the end she is reunited with the artist.

Guy's own personal story was almost as melodramatic. By 1922 she and Blaché had divorced, and she suddenly found it impossible to find work as a director on her own. She went back to France with her daughters, and hoped to renew her contacts there. She was unable to bring with her any prints of her numerous films, however, and little had survived of her Gaumont years. Therefore she had no proof that she had ever done her own film work, and failed to win any jobs. In 1927 she returned to the United States. She spent hours in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., searching for prints of her work in its film depository, but most seemed to have been lost save for six early one-reelers.

Pioneer Across Several Genres

Guy remained an unknown pioneer in filmmaking until 1955, when she was honored with France's Legion of Honor medal as the world's first woman filmmaker. She had resettled in the country of her birth by then, but returned to the United States one final time at the age of 91, in 1964, to be near her daughter. Four years later, she died in Mahwah, New Jersey. A volume of her memoirs, Autobiographie d'une pionnière du cinéma 1873–1968, was published in 1976, and ten years later in English translation by her daughter Simone Blaché as The Memoirs of Alice Guy-Blaché. Later film historians succeeded where she did not, and managed to rescue about 110 of the films she directed. Some of these were featured in a 1995 documentary The Lost Garden: The Life and Cinema of Alice Guy.

A 2002 biography by Alison McMahan, Alice Guy-Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema, settled some of the questions about Guy-Blaché 's early work. Though she was not the first person to make a feature film, for instance, she was the first filmmaker ever to use the close-up shot, a technique that had long been attributed to D.W. Griffith. McMahan's book also discussed Guy's role in the history of gay cinema. As noted, she sometimes appeared in men's clothing in her own films, which were some of the earliest representations of cross-dressing on film. One of her Solax films, Algie the Miner from 1912, relates the story of an effeminate young man who must prove his masculinity by heading West. This film is usually cited as the first portrayal of homosexuality in American film.

Books

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 2: Directors, 4th edition, St. James Press, 2000.

McMahan, Alison, Alice Guy-Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema, New York: Continuum, 2002.

Periodicals

Cineaste, Winter 2003.

New York Times, August 6, 1978.

Online

"Who's Who of Victorian Cinema," British Film Institute, http://www.victorian-cinema.net/guy.htm (January 18, 2006).