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Alice Guy-Blache was one of the most significant directors in the history of cinema. She pioneered close-ups, hand-tinted films, and synchronized sound. Yet, until recently she had been largely ignored by film historians. A new documentary by Pamela Green hopes to change that. Her story starts in 1907, when she left the Gaumont Company and married her assistant to start her own studio, Solax.
Her First Film
In the early days of film, most movies were called actualities — simple shots documenting mundane events: marching troops, trains arriving at stations, etc. Alice Guy-Blache found these films boring and repetitive, and she decided she could do better.
With her characteristic bravado, she asked Gaumont if she could make her own film. He agreed, allowing her to use the company studio and camera on the condition that her secretarial work wouldn’t suffer. The result was a short comedy. The film was a hit. It was called Be Natural.
Her Second Film
As a secretary at French camera company Leon Gaumont, Alice Guy-Blache was present practically at the creation of cinema. In 1895 she witnessed Lumiere’s first demonstration of film projection and saw the potential for narrative storytelling.
In 1910 she started her own studio, Solax Company, and two years later invested in a state-of-the-art facility in Fort Lee, New Jersey, which would become the center of American filmmaking. Her filmography included comedies, westerns and tragedies and she was one of the first directors to use diverse casting.
She married Herbert Blache, and together they formed the Blache Features studio.
Her Third Film
When a woman makes a film today, it’s easy to forget that such things were once incredibly rare. Alice Guy-Blache reshaped cinematic imagination and production, both in the United States and France, and her story is a fascinating one to explore.
In the early days of filmmaking, gender didn’t play much of a role. At Gaumont, she worked in a male-dominated industry. She married, moved to the United States, and founded Solax Studios. She directed ten films for this company between 1914 and 1917, including a handful of five-reelers.
Her Fourth Film
Alice Guy-Blache became the first woman to run a film studio, setting up the Solax Company. While her husband took care of the business side, she was the one to direct the films.
She pushed herself to innovate, incorporating a short animation sequence into her 1912 melodrama, Hotel Honeymoon, in which the moon comes to life. The film has not survived, and the newspaper report of it is cryptic.
She was a smart businesswoman and quick study. But around the time of World War I her marriage fell apart, and she lost her company to a rival.
Her Fifth Film
Alice Guy-Blache pioneered both the French and American film industries, making over a thousand films, including many that were hand-tinted in color. She also founded and presided over her own studio, Solax.
Yet she remains an unsung hero in cinema history. She refused to take movies in a mundane direction, and she was always looking for new techniques to improve storytelling. Her filmmaking was always a mix of art and commerce. She understood that movies had enormous cultural power. But her marriage and her husband’s infidelities ultimately spelled the end of her career.
Her Sixth Film
Alice Guy married cameraman Herbert Blache in 1907 and followed him to the United States, where she built a studio at Gaumont’s underused facility in Flushing, New York. She established her own company, Solax, and made silent films that were distributed by Gaumont. The early days of cinema were dominated by actualities: films of trains pulling into stations, workmen leaving factories, city streets. Alice wanted to make something different. Her films explored topics such as marriage as an equal partnership, reversing gender roles, and action adventures.
Her Seventh Film
After marrying Herbert Blache, a cameraman for Gaumont, she moved to the United States with him. There she ran her own studio, the Solax Company. Her films included Westerns and dramas, and often featured women as the main characters. She was one of the first directors to use diverse casting, such as in her 1906 film The Consequences of Feminism.
She also used the closeup, which was popularized by recognizable filmmakers like D.W. Griffith. But by 1920, her career was ending. The new generation of filmmakers was overwhelmingly male.
Her Eighth Film
In a career that began at the very beginning of filmmaking, Guy-Blache wrote, produced or directed over a thousand films. She was one of the first to use close-ups, hand-tinted style and synchronized sound. In 1907 she married cameraman Herbert Blache and traveled to the U.S., where she opened the financially successful Solax Company in Flushing, NY.
Her films covered a range of topics, from reversing gender roles to exploring marriage as a partnership in Matrimony? Speed Limit (1913). She was also the first to utilize stage business.
Her Nineteenth Film
Alice Guy-Blache directed hundreds of films over the course of her career. Often her work explored new topics, including feminism (Les Resultats du Feminism in 1906) and gender roles (In the Year 2000 in 1912).
When she married cameraman Herbert Blache in 1907 she followed him to the United States where she set up her own studio, the Solax Company. By the end of her career in 1920 she was directing more than half of all productions for this company. She was also writing, editing, and arranging sets.
Her Twentieth Film
In the early days of cinema, most films were called actualities and were essentially documents of everyday life like trains arriving at stations or workers leaving a factory. But Guy-Blache saw something more.
She married cameraman Herbert Blache and followed him to the United States, where she directed ten five-reelers for Solax and later a company called Blache Features Inc. She also wrote and starred in several films. Sadly, most of these films have been lost due to the loss of the highly flammable nitrate stock.
