Overlooked No More: Alice Guy Blaché, the World’s First Female Filmmaker

Armed with a cameraman, an actress and a painted backdrop, she made “La Fée aux Choux” (“The Cabbage Fairy”) in 1896, her first film. A pantomimed one-minute charmer, it shows a young woman who, with a smile and a bosom wreathed in flowers, plucks squalling naked babies from a cabbage patch constructed out of wood. Some historians believe that Blaché’s inaugural effort was “Sage-Femme de Premiére Classe” (“First Class Midwife”) her 1902 remake about a young couple who go shopping for a baby. (Blaché played the husband.)

Gaumont soon made Blaché the head of film production at his company, where she produced and supervised hundreds of films, helped create an organized studio system years before Hollywood was a company town and trained luminaries of the art like Louis Feuillade. When she moved to the United States, where she resumed her film career, her time at Gaumont was touted in profiles. In 1912, the trade journal The Movie Picture World, wrote: “She inaugurated the presentation of little plays on the screen by that company some 16 or 17 years ago.”

Alice Ida Antoinette Guy was born in Saint-Mandé, on the eastern edge of Paris, on July 1, 1873. Her parents, Marie and Émile Guy, were French but lived in Chile, where her father was a bookseller; Marie returned to France for Alice’s birth and then left the child with a grandmother. Three years later, Marie returned for Alice, and they sailed to Chile. While passing through the Strait of Magellan, near Chile’s southern tip, as she recalled in her memoir, she conjured up fairies and beasts on walls of ice — an early, whimsical prelude to her screen reveries.

Assorted tragedies in Chile followed, and the Guys eventually returned to France, but over time the family disintegrated, leaving Alice to support her mother.

Much of Alice’s early years seemed to prepare her for a life in cinema, filled as they were with adventures, deprivations and moments of fortitude. In her first secretarial position, in an all-male factory, she recalled, she boldly stood up to a sexual harasser.

“My youth, my inexperience, my sex,” Blaché wrote of her entrance into moviemaking, “all conspired against me.” But she was hardworking and tenacious, and would prove to be prolific.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/obituaries/alice-guy-blache-overlooked.html?emc=rss&partner=rss