You can thank the first female film director for the fact that movies actually have a plot
Alice Guy-Blaché went from being a secretary to being a visionary of cinema
Alice Guy-Blaché was a secretary when she accompanied her boss, Léon Gaumont, to an event at the Lumière in Paris. People were gathered to witness the first demonstration of film projection. The film screened that evening in March 1895, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, had only one scene: workers leaving the Lumiére plant in Lyon. Guy-Blaché was unimpressed, and thus a seed was planted. As a secretary for a camera-manufacturing and photography supply company, she’d learned marketing strategies and camera mechanics. And because she thought film could be used for more than just the promotion of said cameras, she envisioned adding fictional narrative to the film. Not only had there been no precedent for women directing films, but filmmaking in this way hadn’t been done before. She was the first. But this didn’t stop her from asking her boss for permission to make a film. He was wise enough to grant it.
I thought I could do better … Gathering up my courage, I timidly proposed to Gaumont that I would write one or two short plays and make them for the amusement of my friends. If the developments which evolved from this proposal [the global success of the motion picture business] could have been foreseen, then I probably never would have obtained his agreement. My youth, my lack of experience, my sex all conspired against me.
A year later, at only 23 years old, she debuted her first film, 1896’s La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy), a humorous short about a woman growing up in a cabbage patch. Gaumont provided her with a small house to shoot the film, with a minimal cast made up of her friends. “In this place, I made my debut as a director,” she later recalled of the film’s production. “A sheet painted by a neighbourhood painter who specialised primarily in scarecrows and the like; a vague set — rows of cabbages constructed by a carpenter; costumes rented around the Porte St Martin. The cast: my friends, a crying baby, a worried mother. My first film thus saw the light.”
Along with French filmmaker Georges Méliès’s shorts the same year, her production — vies for the coveted title of history’s first narrative film.
Guy-Blaché was not only the first female director, but the only one between 1896 and1906. According to Justin Morrow, of the website No Film School, her work included early experimentation with visual effects. The films explored dance and travel and much of everyday life. “She also consistently made ground in her quest to develop an aesthetic of narrative filmmaking at a time when filmmaking was still deciding what it was going to be,” Morrow wrote.
Her most ambitious film, La Vie du Christ, was a big-budget production for 1906. The 30-minute feature included a number of locations, 25 different sets, and 300 extras. She is said to be one of the first people to employ special effects like double exposure and running film backwards, and was also a pioneer in matching audio with the images on the screen.
From 1910 to 1914, she oversaw the production of 325 films. Editing scripts, directing 35 to 50 of the films herself — she did it all. She even directed the first film with an all-black cast, A Fool and His Money.
Guy-Blaché, the first, the only, didn’t initially receive the credit she deserved. But like many women who have fought not to be erased, she wrote her own story so the record would recognize her trailblazing efforts.
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