Congrats Alice Guy Blache induction

Congratulations Alice Guy! The induction into the Class of 2013 New Jersey Hall of Fame takes place on Tuesday, January 14, 2014. The steep ticket price ($1,250) for the reception does not allow for me to attend but I can savor the moment as I have worked for years alongside Fort Lee Film Commission in making this happen. Here’s a bit about Alice Guy and what she had gone through. While she is gone from this life since 1968, she will never be forgotten.

ALICE GUY BLACHE
Science and technology, by the end of the 19th century, profoundly shakes and fractures conventions of daily life, thus demanding a new syntax for artistic representation and expression. Alice Guy Blache became a fearless pioneer in early cinema technology, being the first person to create the narrative, make almost a thousand motion pictures, use special effects, sound synchronization and colorization– all before women had the right to vote.

Alice Guy (pronounced a-LEES ghee) was born in Saint Mande, France on July 1, 1873, to French parents. Her father owned a chain of bookstores in Chile and her mother returned home to France, gave birth to Alice then returned to Chile. Alice’s early years in Chile are colorful sights and sounds until an earthquake ruins her father’s business. Eventually, the family returns to France and Alice is sent to a boarding school for a strict Catholic education until age sixteen. Encouraged by a family friend, she learns typing and stenography– a practical skill so she can always support herself. In 1894, Léon Gaumont, “second-in-command” for Felix Richard’s still-photography company hires her as a secretary. Losing a patent suit, Richard is forced out of business, but Gaumont buys the inventory and starts his own company, taking Alice Guy with him.

By 1895 Gaumont, along with his partners– architect Gustave Eiffel, astronomer Joseph Vallot and financier Alfred Besnier– build L. Gaumont & Company into a business known for its motion picture technology. On March 22, 1895, inventor brothers, Auguste and Louis Jean Lumière invite Gaumont and Alice to witness a demonstration of their cinématographe (a 35mm motion picture camera) at the Société d’encouragement ˆ l’industrie nationale. After the demonstration that astounds the audience, Alice persuades Gaumont to allow her to use his motion picture camera to direct a story film. At the time, films of trains pulling into train stations and employees leaving factories at the end of their work day are fascinating, but will audiences pay to see films from someone’s imagination?

In 1896 Alice Guy directs her first film, La Fee aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy) that turns a box office profit. She meets the movers and shakers of the art and technology world during the Barcelona (1896) and Paris (1900) Expositions where new technology and applications are presented as marvels: escalators, diesel engines, and the wondrous Eiffel tower. By 1902 Gaumont demonstrates his chronophone, a synchronized-sound system. He opens a film studio,”Cité Elge” at Buttes-Chaumont that becomes one of the largest studios in Europe and is managed by his secretary, Alice. From 1902 through 1906, Alice is head of production for the Gaumont Film Company and directs over 100 “phonoscènes,” or films made for the chronophone.

Looking to expand into a competitive market, Gaumont sends Alice and Herbert Blaché, a Gaumont manager, assigned as her interpretor and camera operator, to show how the chronograph works. They travel through Spain and Europe where she oversees chronophone demonstrations and assists Blaché with sales. By Christmas Day, 1906, they are officially engaged and they marry soon after. Alice is 33, Blaché is 24. In 1907, Gaumont sends Blaché to the U.S. to promote a chronophone franchise. Alice resigns her position, accompanies her husband and spends time working with investors. The effort is unsuccessful. Gaumont hires Blaché to manage his studio in Flushing, New York. Alice gives birth to her daughter, Simone. By 1910, she sees that the Gaumont studio is underused, so Alice starts her own company, Solax, and rents Gaumont studio space. She gives birth to her son, Reginald.

A wholly owned, woman-run business, Alice Guy Blache builds a Solax studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey costing over $100,000, providing jobs and economic development for the surrounding area. She writes and directs at least half of these films and oversees all production. Her films are social commentaries with role reversals and cross dressing; comedies full of unruly discord, mayhem and acrobatic stunts; marital discord ultimately patched up with happy endings. She experiments with special effects such as split screens, dissolves and camera opticals, sound syncronization and film colorization. Locations become more than travelogues as a showcase for indigenous performance artists displaying their talents. Challenging social taboos in the Progressive Age, Alice hires black actors for Negro roles and portrays women as strong characters in her scenarios. She is the only woman film director in the world producing a consistent body of work– directing at least 324 films.

When Blaché’s contract with Gaumont expires in 1913, Alice makes him president of Solax so that she can concentrate on writing and directing. Blaché, however, starts his own film company, Blaché Features, absorbing Solax studios and virtually ending Solax production by 1914. Bad investments, bad management, large businesses taking over distribution territories contribute to a Solax shut down. Alice continues to direct, but her last few films were not, according to investors, commercially successful.

In 1917, Simone, age nine, and Reginald, age five, become seriously ill and Alice cares for her children while her husband continues to manage business in Fort Lee but in 1918, Blaché leaves for Hollywood with a starlet, abandoning his family. Alice gives up her house in Fort Lee and moves into an apartment in New York City. When she survives the Spanish flu in 1919, Blaché sends for her to recuperate. Alice moves into a small bungalow in Los Angeles with her children that he provides, but Blaché does not live with them. He hires Alice as his directing assistant. A few months later she is called back to Fort Lee to oversee the auction of her personal and the Solax properties.

Bankruptcy proceedings end, the Blachés divorce and in 1922, Alice Guy-Blaché returns with her children to France where she is mostly forgotten by the French film industry. She returns to the U.S. in 1927 to find her films to prove her ability but is unable to find any, even at the Library of Congress. She becomes financially dependent on her daughter, Simone. Alice supplements her daughter’s income by writing children’s stories and novelizations of films for women’s magazines.

Léon Gaumont publishes a history of L. Gaumont & Company in 1930 but does not mention any of the film production before 1907. Alice writes to him and Gaumont agrees to add and correct the manuscript, but never does. Through the 1940s and into 1950s, Alice speaks at high schools and women’s clubs in Europe. These appearances lead her to write her memoirs, compile a filmography, and renew the search for her films. In 1953, Alice receives the Légion d’Honneur Award, France’s highest nonmilitary honor. A decade later, she and Simone move to New Jersey. On March 24, 1968, Alice Guy Blaché dies in a nursing home in Mahwah, New Jersey at the age of 95.

A 1912 issue of Moving Picture World noted “Madame Blache is never ruffled, never agitated, never annoyed by the obtrusive effects of minor characters to thrust themselves into prominence. With a few simple directions, uttered without apparent emotion, she handles the interweaving movements like a military leader might the maneuvers of an army.” As a director for twenty-eight years, Alice Guy Blaché accomplished things no one was doing at the time and is just one reminder of New Jersey’s rich film history, and more specifically, a woman of consequence in her role as one of the founders of the modern-day film industry.

MADAME DIRECTOR, a feature-length screenplay, follows Alice Guy’s quest to find her lost films before she becomes entirely forgotten by the studio filmmaking industry. Written by Christina Kotlar, this original story and screenplay is inspired by historic fact and events that lead Alice Guy Blache to recount her role as the first woman filmmaker who determined her own place in cinema history.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
: Many thanks to the members of the Fort Lee Film Commission; Professor Richard Koszarski is editor-in-chief of Film History: An International Journal and is film historian for the Fort Lee Film Commission, Fort Lee, New Jersey; In 1995, The Lost Garden– The Life and Cinema of Alice Guy-Blaché, a documentary by Marquise Lepage; In 2002,  Alice Guy-Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema by Alison McMahon, In 1976 publication of Alice Guy Blaché’s Memoirs (in French), with a filmography by Francis Lacassin; In 1986, publication of Alice Guy Blaché’s Memoirs (in English), edited by Anthony Slide, translated by Roberta and Simone Blaché; In 1994, publication of Victor Bachy’s Alice Guy-Blaché: La Première femme cinéaste du monde.