'There is nothing connected with the staging of a motion picture that a woman cannot do as easily as a man, and there is no reason why she cannot completely master every technicality of the art.’
Alice Guy-Blaché, 'Woman's Place in Photoplay Production', Moving Picture World, 11 July 1914

I recently watched a fascinating documentary made by Pamela B Green about the French filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché (‘Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché’). 

Guy-Blaché witnessed the birth of cinema and became the first female film director. For 10 years she was the only female director. In a career that spanned more than 25 years, she was also a screenwriter, producer and studio head. She pioneered the use of narrative in film, inspired Eisenstein and was admired by Hitchcock. She helped create modern movie-making. 

Let us consider what we can learn from her story.

1. Be Curious

Alice Guy was born in Paris in 1873 and raised in Switzerland, Chile and France. Her father, who owned a bookstore and publishing company in Chile, was concerned when she expressed ambition to work in the theatre.

‘My father said, “No! Never! Actress? I'd rather see you dead." You know how the bourgeoisie was at the time.’

Alice trained as a stenographer, and in 1894 she got a job at a manufacturer of cameras and other optical devices, which subsequently became Gaumont et Cie.

‘I knew nothing about photography. Absolutely nothing…I had to learn everything.’

In 1895 Alice attended, with her boss Leon Gaumont, the first demonstration of film projection by the Lumiere brothers. 

'It seemed extraordinary to me. It filled me with adoration. It was the birth of cinema.’

Alice set about familiarising herself with her employer’s stock of cameras and with the mechanics of the business. And Gaumont acceded to her request to be taught how to make a film, ‘on the condition she didn’t let the mail suffer.’

2. Be Inventive

Early motion pictures documented everyday life: workers leaving the factory, street scenes, trains coming into the station, waves crashing on a beach. Alice determined that her first film should tell a story - albeit a very brief one. 

Shot in 1896 with a hand-cranked camera mounted on a tripod, and lasting less than a minute, ‘The Cabbage Fairy’ features a cheerful nymph who plucks babies from a magical cabbage patch. It is considered the world's first narrative film.

3. Be Ambitious

From 1896 to 1906 Alice was Gaumont's head of production. She directed dance and travel films, animal and stunt movies. She employed some of the first special effects, including hand-tinted colour, double exposure, close-ups, and running a film backwards. She learned to use Gaumont's revolutionary Chronophone system, which recorded sound on a wax disc and synchronized it with the film. She hired and trained writers and directors, set designers and art directors, and she ran weekly production meetings at the Gaumont studio in Parc des Buttes Chaumont.

‘And so, bit by bit, we improved what we did.’

Gradually Alice became more ambitious for her output. Her 1906 film ‘The Life of Christ’, dramatising illustrations from the Tissot Bible, comprised 25 episodes and employed 300 extras.

4. Be Active

In 1907 Alice married Herbert Blaché, a London-born colleague at Gaumont.

'Actually, I didn't want to marry an Englishman. Englishmen aren't very nice.’

The couple moved to the US where Herbert was appointed Gaumont’s production manager, and in 1908 Alice gave birth to their first child in New York.

But Alice was reluctant to settle down as a housewife.

‘I had had experience of the picture business – I knew it thoroughly and it seemed a shame not to put my knowledge to some good advantage when there was so much room.’

After working for a while with her husband at Gaumont, in 1910 Alice founded The Solax Company in Flushing, New York. 

‘I am a woman of activity. I still want to work and I think I can make money.’

5. Be Diverse

Alice was the first woman to run her own studio, and she hired and trained the first American female director, Lois Weber.

At Solax Alice created films about marriage and parenthood, seduction comedies, chase films and Westerns; military movies, song and dance films and political pictures. She consistently wrote strong roles for women. She also directed the first film with an entirely African-American cast, ‘A Fool and His Money’ (1912).

6. Be Commercial

Solax went from strength to strength. In 1912, while pregnant with her second child, Alice built a new, technologically advanced studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, which had become the home of early American cinema. The production facility had stages built under a glass roof, administrative offices and dressing rooms; a set-fabrication workshop, costume-design department and a film-processing laboratory. 

In a feature article at the time the New York Dramatic Mirror observed of Alice:

‘She stands as the dominant figure in a motion picture factory and studio which she organised and built.’

7. Be Natural

Alice pinned up a large sign in her Fort Lee studio instructing her actors to 'Be Natural'.

Although many of Alice’s films have been lost or destroyed, you can still find a number of them online. Most are simple sketches under 10 minutes long. They are concise, insightful and often very witty. And, as suggested by Alice’s motto, they exhibit remarkable naturalism. 

‘The Drunken Mattress’ (1906) features a mattress that takes on a life of its own (rather like a modern duvet joke). ‘Madam’s Craving’ (1907) presents a pregnant woman who can’t resist stealing a child’s lollypop, a drinker’s absinthe and a homeless man’s herring.

In ‘The Sticky Woman’ (1906) a lady at the Post Office instructs her maid to lick all her envelopes. A top hatted gentleman, rather excited by this, steals a kiss from the maid, but becomes glued to her mouth. When they are eventually cut free, the man’s moustache is left on the maid’s top lip.

‘The Consequences of Feminism’ (1906) takes a comedic look at what life would be like if the roles of men and women were reversed. The men do the housework, while the women sit about reading the paper, smoking and drinking.

In the poignant ‘Autumn Leaves’ (1912) a young girl, whose older sister has consumption, overhears the doctor say: ‘When the last leaf falls she will have passed away.’ The child goes out into the garden and ties some of the falling leaves to their branches to stop this prognosis coming to pass. 

A number of factors led to the demise of Solax. First there was the Edison Trust, an agreement between major film companies, distributors and Eastman Kodak, which constrained independent filmmakers and prompted many to move west to Hollywood. Then there was Herbert. Although he was a less capable filmmaker and businessman than Alice, he insisted on an active management role at Solax. He was also unfaithful. In 1918, he left his wife and children to pursue a career in Hollywood.

Solax accumulated debt, the studios were rented out to other companies, and, after a fire in 1919, what remained was auctioned off. 

Alice, who had almost died from the Spanish flu while filming her final film ‘Tarnished Reputations’ (1920), divorced her husband and returned to France. Despite her extraordinary experience, she struggled to find work in the film industry there.

‘People don’t want to hire white haired women.’

Gradually Alice’s contribution to the motion picture industry was erased. In the early years of cinema plagiarism had been endemic and record keeping erratic. An official history of Gaumont failed to mention her, film critics misattributed her films to other directors, and no publisher was interested in her memoire. What’s more, since few of the early pictures survived, Alice was unable to correct these injustices.

‘At the head of the Gaumont company, I think I was responsible for a good part of the success of the pictures department. But in France, especially in that time, and more especially for women, I had to fight hard to keep my rank…I only claimed the title of the first female director that I alone was entitled to.’

A subsequent American documentary about Fort Lee stated that Herbert had founded Solax. Here too Alice’s role in the story of film, along with that of many other women directors and producers, was written out. 

'Wall Street money comes in the front door, women are forced out the back door.’
Stephen J. Ross, Professor of History, USC

Alice lived quietly with her daughter in France and Switzerland, and then in 1964 she returned to the US, settling in New Jersey. In 1968, at the age of 94, she died in a nursing home. 

Alice Guy-Blaché had overseen the production of more than 700 films. She had been a vibrant creative force, a shrewd businesswoman, a persistent pioneer. She teaches a great many lessons for people working in the creative industries today:

1. Be Curious
2. Be Inventive
3. Be Ambitious
4. Be Active
5. Be Diverse
6. Be Commercial
7. Be Natural

But there is a final critical lesson that we should all take from Alice’s story:
 
8. Always give credit where credit is due.

'She was more than just a talented businesswoman. She was a filmmaker of rare sensitivity with a remarkably poetic eye. She was more or less forgotten by the industry she helped create.’
Martin Scorsese

'We really thought we had a purpose.
We were so anxious to achieve.
We had hope,
The world held promise,
For a slave to liberty.
Freely I slaved away for something better.
And I was bought and sold.
And all I ever wanted
Was to come in from the cold.’

Joni Mitchell, ‘Come in from the Cold'

No. 321