Alice Guy-Blaché: the Life and Career of Cinema’s First Woman Director

December 2, 2022 4:06 PM

Alice Guy-Blaché -- The Consequences of Feminism (1906)

Alice Guy-Blaché -- A Fool and His Money (1912) First Narrative film with an all black cast*

Alice Guy-Blaché -- Falling Leaves (1912)

Alice Guy-Blaché -- The Ocean Waif (1916)

Films - Alice Guy-Blaché

Alice Guy-Blaché: Cinema’s First Woman Director

*A Fool and His Money is flat out racist to our eyes today in its depiction of black.men.as comic buffoons and that fact.cannot be ignored. But... it is not viciously intentionally dehumanizingly racist like D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. So, positives over negatives, I think that making the first movie with an all black cast is a bit more to Alice Guy-Blaché's credit than to her discredit.

Apart from that, I learned today that in France, babies were not brought by the Stork as they are in USA-ia but rather found in the Cabbage Patch. Betcha most of you -- like me -- on this side of the Atlantic did not know that. Gives a whole new meaning to Cabbage Patch Kids, don't it?

But more on that later...

It’s fascinating to realize that a year before Georges Méliès was shooting the still rather crude, cartoon-like The Courtship of the Sun & Moon, Alice Guy released a sophisticated and clever satire in which she skewered male paternalistic notions of empowerment by imagining a reversal of male/female stereotypical roles as representing The Consequences of Feminism (1906).

Playing on the male terror emanating from the growing female empowerment, Guy showed her opponents what life might look like in the future if women treated their companions as males had throughout the centuries, suggesting that gender roles were not in-born but were a result of acculturation and basic received attitudes about sexuality.

Filmmaking Pioneer Alice Guy-Blaché, The First Ever Female Movie Director, Subject Of New Biopic

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché review – paean to a movie pioneer

And a review of: Alice Guy Blaché | Les résultats du féminisme (The Consequences of Feminism)*

*CW: White text on Fuschia background of the above is the internet version of that famous first year SNL skit of Michael 'Mr. Mike' O'Donoghue's impression of Mike Douglas of The Mike Douglas Show fame after red hot needles were thrust in his eyes

History’s First Female Filmmaker Has Been Rescued From Obscurity Thanks to an Enlightening New Jodie Foster-Narrated Documentary

Now I get the whole Cabbage Patch Kid thing, by the way...

Some do, some do not:

Do You Believe in Fairies? Cabbages, Victorian Memes, and the Birth of Cinema: Seeing Sapphic Sexuality in the Silent Era

A Queer History of the Cabbage Patch Kids

I blame the Stork, myself.

Or France, for that matter... Cabbages -- who knew over here?

Previously:

Alice Guy-Blaché, World's First Woman Filmmaker

posted by y2karl (3 comments total)

Released in 1895, the Lumière brothers' "Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon" is generally credited as the first motion picture ever made, and it's exactly what the title suggests: A 46-second static shot of workers leaving a factory. There have been claims of its significance as the basis for a realist or documentary tradition in cinema, but it was more simply a technical demonstration of what would evolve into the great art form of the 20th century and beyond. The development of film as a storytelling medium would take a little time.

Yet the very next year, a Frenchwoman named Alice Guy-Blaché directed "The Cabbage Fairy," a strange and whimsical narrative film in which a dancing fairy pulls newborns out of giant cabbage plants and lays them side-by-side. At the time, Guy-Blaché was working as a stenographer at Gaumont, which was emerging as a leading source of film equipment (and, later, production), and her ambition led her to become the first female filmmaker — and perhaps the only one of cinema's inaugural decade. But recognition for her artistic achievements has come slowly, to say the least, and it's been woefully incomplete.

the late 1800s, a stenography job was prestigious and lucrative station for women in the workplace, but Guy-Blaché asserted herself at Gaumont immediately, to the point where she was invited to see the Lumières first film before its public exhibition. After "The Cabbage Fairy," she become the head of production at Gaumont, and her career expanded when she and her husband, Herbert Blaché, moved to the United States and opened production facilities in Flushing, New York and Fort Lee, New Jersey, which was Hollywood before Hollywood existed....

Auteur! Auteur!: 'Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché'

Thanks to hippybear's 21 old films from 1895 to 1902 colorized and upscaled etc, Alice Guy-Blaché's name started popping up all over my Chrome and YouTube search results thereafter for 'Lumière'. And upon examination, I thought she, her life and career deserved more attention. Hence this post.

Also, whether it was coverage on either NPR or BBC World News -- which runs midnight to 4:00 AM on the local affiliate of the former -- an emphasis was made about how sexy and naughty innuendo filled her films were for their time -- starting with The Cabbage Fairy. Which caught my ear of course.
posted by y2karl at 6:26 PM on December 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Women were more common behind the scenes in the silent film industry that you might expect. Lois Weber, for example, was also important.

Thanks for the post.
posted by NotLost at 7:44 PM on December 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Not just the first female filmmaker, but arguably history's first director of narrative cinema.
posted by vibrotronica at 9:50 AM on December 3, 2022 [2 favorites]