Meet Alice Guy-Blaché: The First Female Director
She created over 1,000 films during her 20 year career, ran her own film studio, and was named as an inspiration for everyone from Alfred Hitchcock to Barbra Streisand, who called her “the French film pioneer who invented the director’s job” — so why is Alice Guy-Blaché so rarely given the credit she deserves as not only the first female director, but arguably the first director period?
The world’s first female director helped shape the film industry from the start: as secretary to French photographer Léon Gaumont in 1894, 21-year-old Alice Guy attended an early demonstration of a 60mm motion picture camera by the very first filmmakers, the Lumière brothers. She was so inspired by the screening that she asked Gaumont to use their camera to film a story, and went on to write, produce, and direct her first film — The Cabbage Fairy, a comedic story about a woman who grows children in her cabbage patch — on the back patio of Gaumont’s studio, using special effects techniques learned from her experience with still photography. At this point, the camera and its technologies (film, projectors, and one of Gaumont’s inventions, the Chronophone sound system) were brand new, and this was arguably the first time that anyone experimenting with this new medium used it to tell a narrative story. Through Alice, the role of a film director as we know it today was born.
And as a director, Alice was prolific: over two decades, she created dozens of short films and feature films every year (including a movie called In The Year 2000, When Women Are in Charge) and was a trailblazer in every aspect of filmmaking, from diverse casting (her 1912 film A Fool and His Money was the first film in existence to feature an all-African American cast) to shooting on location with hundreds of extras.
On one of her earliest shoots, Alice fell in love with English cameraman Herbert Blaché. After marrying in 1907, they moved from France to New Jersey, where Alice founded her own film studio, The Solax Company, and started producing a film a week. Within a few years, though, Herbert had an affair with a young actress and moved to Hollywood, leaving Alice bankrupt after the divorce. Forced to auction off her share in the studio and return home to France in 1922, Alice never made another film. She did, however, write a memoir, in which she called cinema her true Prince Charming.
In 1930, Gaumont published the history of his film company — the first in the world, which Alice had been so instrumental in the creation of, acting as its first Head of Production — with no mention of her at all. Although Alice wrote to him to demand that he give her the proper credit for her contributions and Gaumont agreed to do so, his revisions were never published. For decades, Alice’s role in film history was almost completely forgotten, as successive historical records rarely mentioned her alongside her peers in pioneering the film industry. She died believing that her legacy had been erased and that most of her films had been lost.
Alice received France’s Legion of Honor in 1955 and — more recently — was honored with a Director’s Guild of America Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. A documentary about her life, Be Natural, is currently in post-production (and still needs funding, since licensing her films and continuing research is costly — you can read more about the current state of the project on their website) , so although Alice and her foundational contributions to the film industry were largely forgotten for decades, she’s finally starting to get her due.
Even today, however, only 7% of directors are female, making Alice and her struggle for creative recognition particularly poignant in light of how few women have been able to follow in her footsteps. Just as Alice saw a chance to shape the rules of a new and revolutionary storytelling medium, we too have the ability to tell stories using still-evolving technologies — from YouTube to social media to virtual reality — that provide an opportunity to make our voices heard: so let’s seize it.
Featured Image Credit: Wikimedia
