Be Natural: The untold story of Alice Guy-Blachéhttp://vimeo.com/70380930Alice Guy-Blache should be the most famous woman in film history. She was the first female director, the first person to make a narrative film, pioneered sound and film synching, was the first person to make a film with an all black cast, the
only woman to ever run a studio. And yet, her legacy is almost forgotten. Her films are lost or rotting in archives, or credited to other people, and barely anyone remembers her name. She was a big deal. In a time where women did not have the right to vote and where men wrote history, she made some of the most important steps in filmmaking – film not as documentary or technological novelty, but as art and as storytelling. Characters, movie stars, storylines and character arcs, audible dialogue. It's hard to imagine movies without those things. Why is this women just footnote in film history?
There is a
Kickstarter project looking to raise $200,000 to preserve Alice's films and tell her story. It's got few days left to raise just under $40,000 more to meet the target. If you're interested in this kind of thing, watch the trailer about the project. Spread the word or perhaps even spare a bit of pocket change if you're so inclined.
The year is 1895. A new technology called the "mechanical pencil" is patented, the first comic strip is printed in a newspaper, and photography is the talk of the town. This is the dawn of the modern era, and there are no limits to what the future holds. Major innovations in technology change the way people live, work, travel, dress, communicate, and the way they are entertained.
In Paris, the Lumière Brothers have one of their first private screenings of their revolutionary Cinématographe, the first reliable system to project moving images. A small group of friends and colleagues, including engineer and industrialist Léon Gaumont, watch in awe the soon-to-be famous footage of workers leaving a factory. Cinema is born.
There is a young woman in the audience. Her name is Alice. She is 23. She is secretary to Léon Gaumont. She experiences the light and shadows of the flowing sequence of images on the screen as more than a technological wonder. She sees life. She sees stories. She sees the future.
Alice Guy (after her marriage known as Madame Blaché and after her divorce as Alice Guy-Blaché) went on to make one of the first narrative films ever made. By her own account, she made it in 1896 (some say before Georges Méliès).
And she kept going. She made one of the first films ever with a close-up, created synchronized sound films as early as 1902, was in good part responsible for the birth and growth of the Gaumont film studio in Paris, France, which she ran for almost a decade (1897-1907), and in 1910, she founded, built, and ran her own studio, Solax, first in Flushing, New York, then in Fort Lee, New Jersey (not far from where Edison and D.W. Griffith worked). She was a wife and a mother. She wrote, directed, or produced more than a 1,000 films over her 20-year-long career.
Then it all ended. Her name disappeared from film history, and her legacy vanished into the shadows.
A pioneer in the movie industries of both France and the U.S., an innovative filmmaker with a career spanning 1896 to 1920, director, screenwriter, producer, studio owner, CEO, entrepreneur (as well as wife and mother). If she had done only one of these jobs in the earliest years of cinema, it would have been enough to win her a firm place in cinema history. This feature documentary sheds new light on the many accomplishments of Alice Guy-Blaché, a woman you ought to know.
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Topic: Be Natural: The untold story of Alice Guy-Blaché