Alice Guy Blaché (July 1,1873 – March 24,1968), the world’s first woman filmmaker, was one of the key figures in the development of narrative film and is considered to be one of the first directors of a fiction film. From 1896 to 1920 she directed hundreds of short films (including over 100 synchronized sound films and twenty-two feature films), produced hundreds more, and was the first – and so far the only – woman to own and run her own studio plant (The Solax Studio in Fort Lee, NJ, 1910-1914). She made films within a range of genres from social documents, historical and religious dramas, comedies, adventures and romance. Gilbert Adair, the distinguished writer on cinema wrote,“Her films are loaded with wit, charm, magic and an explorer’s curiosity and vision.”
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… read more
Alice Guy Blaché (July 1,1873 – March 24,1968), the world’s first woman filmmaker, was one of the key figures in the development of narrative film and is considered to be one of the first directors of a fiction film. From 1896 to 1920 she directed hundreds of short films (including over 100 synchronized sound films and twenty-two feature films), produced hundreds more, and was the first – and so far the only – woman to own and run her own studio plant (The Solax Studio in Fort Lee, NJ, 1910-1914). She made films within a range of genres from social documents, historical and religious dramas, comedies, adventures and romance. Gilbert Adair, the distinguished writer on cinema wrote,“Her films are loaded with wit, charm, magic and an explorer’s curiosity and vision.”
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 as a secretary at a still-photography company in Paris. Unknowingly, she had just stepped into the vortex from which cinema would be born. Just twenty-one, schooled in convents and trained as a secretary, she would go on to shape the greatest art form of the twentieth century.
Guy persuaded her boss, Léon Gaumont, to let her direct a story film. The result, the one-minute La Fée aux choux (The Cabbage Fairy) started off her twenty-eight year career in the movie business. In the first half of her career, as head of film production for the Gaumont Company, she would almost single-handedly develop the art of cinematic narrative. On one of her film sets she met and fell in love with Gaumont sales manager Herbert Blaché, nine years her junior. Their marriage in March of 1907 meant that Alice Guy had to resign her position with Gaumont; at that moment she thought her film career was over. Gaumont sent Blaché to manage the Gaumont studio in Flushing, NY. Guy Blaché had given birth to her daughter, Simone, in 1908, but this new commitment did not stop her from forming the Solax company, using the Flushing Studio during Solax’s first year of operation. Business was so good that Guy Blaché, though pregnant with her second child, went from directing one film a week to three and was able to build a $100,000 glass-roof studio in Fort Lee in 1912. This made her the first woman to own her own studio and studio plant. In 1913 she directed her American masterpiece, Dick Whittington and His Cat, for which she blew up a ship off the Jersey Shore.
In June of 1914 Blaché’s contract with Gaumont ended and his wife made him president of Solax so that she could concentrate on writing and directing. After three months, Blaché resigned and started his own film company, Blaché Features, partly out of a need to raise capital and partly because he was tired of living in his wife’s shadow. By 1914 Solax was virtually defunct. For the next two years, Blaché and Guy Blaché had a successful personal and business partnership, as they alternated producing and directing longer films for Blaché Features and then Popular Plays and Players, but it was harder to turn a profit. They became directors for hire. Guy Blaché directed Olga Petrova, Doris Kenyon, Bessie Love, among others.
In 1918 Blaché abandoned his wife and children and went to Hollywood with one of his actresses. Guy Blaché directed her last film in 1919 and almost died after contracting the Spanish influenza. Blaché brought his family to Hollywood, where they maintained separate households, though Guy Blaché worked as his assistant on several films starring Alla Nazimova. By 1922 the couple was divorced and Guy Blaché had auctioned off her film studio as part of bankruptcy proceedings. 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 divorce, 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. Her role in film history was almost completely forgotten until her own memoirs were published in 1976.
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. —http://aliceguy.com/wiki
