.jpg)
Alice Guy Blache: Lost Visionary of the Cinema
by Alison McMahan.
Filmed as Be Natural:
The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018), documentary directed by
Pamela B. Green.
Published by Continuum
Intl Pub Group.
Published 2002.
Hardcover.
ISBN-10: 0826451586
ISBN-13: 978-0826451583
Description:
The time has arrived, so
it would seem, when woman must take her place beside man in the majority of
arts and professions in the business world. In women of the caliber of Madame
Alice Blaché it has also been demonstrated that there is a possibility of their
doing so without being shorn of that most desirable of womanly qualities,
femininity. – The Moving Picture News, 1912.
It has long been a
source of wonder to me that many women have not seized upon the wonderful
opportunities offered to them by the motion-picture art to make their way to
fame and fortune as producers of photodramas. Of all the arts there is probably
none in which they can make such a splendid use of talents so much more natural
to a woman than to a man and so necessary to its perfection. – Alice Guy
Blaché, 1914.
Over a hundred years
after she started making films (which was considerably earlier than D.W.
Griffith, Mabel Normand, and Lillian Gish began their careers), the life and
work of Alice Guy Blaché is still shrouded in myth and controversy.
Only a fraction (111) of
the approximately one thousand films that she directed still exist, and almost
half of these have been found very recently. The films are spread out in
archives all over the world. Not all of them are available for viewing, even to
scholars, and many of them are in desperate need of conservation and
preservation.
It is widely agreed that
she was the first woman filmmaker but there is considerable debate as to
whether she made the first ever fiction film. She played a key role in early
sound film production, and yet this part of her career is almost always ignored.
She is, to this day, the only woman ever to have owned and run her own film
studio. And yet she made her final film in 1920, at the age of 47, and died in
New Jersey in 1968, unacknowledged, unheralded, almost totally forgotten.
Ten years of painstaking
research has enabled Alison McMahan to piece together the career of this
extraordinary woman. What results is the first full-length treatment of Alice
Guy Blaché’s work, the debunking of several long-standing myths about her and,
ultimately, the emergence of a feminist figurehead of the filmmaking industry.
"McMahan s book is
an obsessively detailed history of a true motion-picture pioneer." – American
Cinematographer, July 2002.
"The author
provides intriguing information about Guy s life, the early days of film
production, and Guy s independent film company (Solax)." – Choice,
November 2002.
"A fascinating book
that will interest scholars and general readers alike." – Richard Abel,
Drake University.
"Monumental...a
daunting achievement." – Los Angeles Times, August 15, 2002.
