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Alice Guy Blache: Lost Visionary of the Cinema
by Alison McMahan.Published 2002.
Hardcover.
ISBN-10: 0826451586
ISBN-13: 978-0826451583
Description:
"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.
ISBN-13: 978-0826451583
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.
