Alice Guy, the woman's touch

Directors often are men. I mentioned Dorothy Arzner a few months ago. Her position in Hollywood is rather unique. Ida Lupino also directed films but she was primarily famous for her career as an actress, which is how she began anyway.

Did you know that one of the first internationally successful directors of Cinema History happens to be a woman?

Before the D.W. Griffith, before Cecil B. DeMille, there was a woman who, amazingly enough, started as a simple secretary for Mr. Gaumont and became the first woman film director.

Her name was Alice Guy. She directed her first film some time between 1896 or 1902 but her last was made in 1920. In that time, she developed the use of special effects, color, sound, etc. More importantly, she made the medium evolve from just shooting an unrehearsed street scene for a minute or two, to filming a fiction film of feature length.
The confusion concerning the start of her career comes from the fact that she claimed it started in 1996 although the film she mentions as her first was identified as from 1902.

Alice on the set of her first film in 1902

She remembered her first film to be a short subject about a “cabbage fairy” who made babies appear in a garden. Until recently, it was naturally assumed that this film was “The cabbage fairy”, directed earlier in 1900 by some unknown director, but a closer inspection of Gaumont films enabled to identify the film as Birth of the Children, later retitled Midwife to the upper classes, with a similar subject. The confusion was easy: the subject is roughly the same, but the sign on the seller’s shop clearly says “The cabbage fairy”, which title Alice Guy preferred anyway (It may have been a working title). The picture on the left was taken after the filming as a souvenir, Alice Guy jokingly wore the unknown actor's clothes so she could appear between her two friends and actresses: Germaine and Yvonne Serand who were sisters. Here is the film:

25 years before the success of The Jazz Singer, she also made more than 400 sound films as early as 1902 with a process called chronophone. They were usually just one continuous shot of someone singing or dancing. In this rare behind the scene shot from January 9, 1907, Alice is seen directing The Capulets's Ball from Romeo and Juliet (Catalog number 300), assisted by Etienne Arnaud who is wearing sunglasses to shield his eyes from the intense lighting.

More ambitious projects came her way: in 1906, she directed a 33 minute epic called The Birth, The Life and The Death of Christ. Although primitive to a modern audience (the film is basically a succession of wide angle scenes in the tradition of the theater), it was nevertheless a definite breakthrough for the time with elaborate sets and costumes, animals and hundreds of extras.

Alice Guy directing Bessie Love

Soon after her marriage with an English director named Herbert Blaché, she moved to the USA to work with American stars of the time like Bessie Love, Olga Petrova; and for William Randolph Hearst among others. She even created her own film studio (Solax) in New Jersey. Unfortunately, she moved back to France after her divorce and gave up the film industry. Although she directed hundreds of films (among which many are lost even though she tried herself to find copies later) and eventually got some recognition (she was awarded the legion of honor late in her life), she is mostly forgotten like many other pioneers of cinema.
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That’s all for today folks!