Lights! Camera! Alice! by Mara Rockliff

Author:Mara Rockliff [Rockliff, Mara and Ciraolo, Simona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2018-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

So why hasn’t everybody heard of Alice Guy-Blaché?

As a woman, Alice always had to fight for recognition of her talent and hard work. Her boss, Léon Gaumont, let her make movies just for fun, after her “real” work at the camera company was done. But when Alice’s films became a huge success, the board of directors of the Gaumont Company decided these new moving pictures must be important enough to put a man in her place. Luckily, the president of the board was an open-minded engineer named Gustave Eiffel.

Alice won Eiffel over to her side, and she was left in charge.

In 1907, Alice went to America. Many American women were finding jobs in film. Women worked as scriptwriters and set designers, camera operators and film editors. Women made props, sewed costumes, worked in laboratories, acted, answered phones. There were female film critics, magazine publishers, theater managers, and heads of sales. Not long after Alice arrived, the first American woman director, Lois Weber, got her start. Dozens more soon followed.

But as the film industry grew, women found themselves pushed out. Actresses were still needed, of course, but their roles changed. Once, daring young heroines chased armed robbers across the tops of speeding trains. Now, they were told to bat their eyelashes and swoon.

When the first film histories were written, Alice’s name was nowhere to be found. A number of her films were mentioned, but credit for them went to her male assistants—or even to men she’d never heard of, men who had never directed a film.

To set the record straight, Alice wrote her life story. Nobody would publish it. She returned to the United States, hoping to track down the hundreds of films she’d left behind, but couldn’t find a single one.

Back in France, however, a discovery was made. Among their dead father’s papers, the sons of Léon Gaumont found information about Alice and her role as a movie pioneer. They made this information public, and in 1955, at the age of 80 (or 82), Alice was awarded the Legion of Honor, the highest award in France.

The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché, translated by her daughter and granddaughter, finally were published in America in 1986. And since the 1990s, Alice has found a place in standard histories of film—though, compared to men who worked in film at the same time, she remains little known.

Today, when female film directors are still rare, there is a growing interest in the active part women played in early film. Slowly, Alice’s lost films are being rediscovered—and, along with them, Alice.

* Say: GHEE blah-SHAY. She made her French movies under her birth name, Alice Guy. Then, after marrying Herbert Blaché and moving to America, she made her American movies under her married name, Alice Guy-Blaché.

** Some writers give Alice’s birth year as 1873, but her daughter said it was 1875.

In this book, the title cards used to mark episodes in Alice's life are all titles of films she made.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.