Obres

Informació de l'obra i context de creació

Alice Guy-Blaché (France 1873 - USA 1964) is considered the first filmmaker to efficiently develop narrative filmmaking in the history of cinema. She was present when the Lumière brothers held the first-ever cinema screening in Paris and immediately saw its potential for storytelling.  
 
The following year, she was making her own fictional films and helped establish the rules of this brand-new medium. She incorporated now-standard techniques such as editing, special effects (although primitive), and hand-tinted colour. She was the first to create music videos where music was synchronized with the film. In 1906 Alice produced what was considered the longest film of that time. She made, directed, produced or supervised around 1000 films, often doing all three herself.

Indicacions

A fool and His Money is the first narrative film with an all-African American cast. A 10-minute silent vaudeville-style American comedy film,  it was made in 1912 and directed by the French director Alice Guy-Blaché, produced by her production company Solax, and starring cakewalk* king William Russell as Sam. 
 
 *a pre-Civil War dance originally performed by slaves on plantation grounds. 
 
 
The plot of the film is as follows: Sam Jones is a labourer, a wielder of the white-wash brush. He is in love with Lindy Williams. Having saved up quite a little money, Sam buys some swell second-hand clothes and goes to Lindy's home. Lindy's people are quite prosperous, her father having retired from his job as "Public Porter." Lindy is a coquettish beauty however, and so trifles with Sam's affections.  
 
She plays Sam against Bill Johnson and finally, in despair, Sam retires from the field. Walking along the road beaten and despondent, Sam finds a lot of money. Now, he vows, he will show them! He buys full dress clothes and other swell duds, an automobile and jewellery.  
Like a peacock he begins parading himself before Lindy and his rival, and, as can be expected, coquettish Lindy transfers her affections to him. 
 Sam makes hay while the sun shines, proposing to Lindy and basking in her affection. After she accepts, he sends out invitations to a reception, during which he plans to announce his engagement. 
 
 During the reception, Bill Johnson and his pal, Slick Mr. Tighe, concoct a scheme to ruin Sam. They invite him to a poker game where they cleverly stack the cards and pass aces under the table with their naked toes. Consequently, Sam is relieved of his fortune. When Lindy is informed of this, she gives Sam the cold shoulder and offers her arm to Slick Mr. Tighe, the new possessor of all of Sam's wealth. 
 
This film appears to have been aimed at largely black audiences. Perhaps the alternate title, ‘Darktown Aristocrats’ best captures the fact that the humour derives from placing black actors in bourgeois settings and clothing.  
 
Screenwriter, author and filmmaker, Alison McMahan, argues in an excerpt from her award-winning book, “Alice Guy Blaché, Lost Visionary of the Cinema”, that the film is certainly racist (note this was stated before the film was watched, before the rediscovery), but that it also reflects “the dream of assimilation” associated with both immigrants and the black middle class.  
 
For Blaché, “assimilation meant taking on the stereotypes of the adopted culture.” Blaché was a French immigrant to the United States however this did not prevent her from replicating racist stereotypes of American culture. 
 
In 1912 and until the fifties, black audiences in the U.S. were forced to watch films in segregated theatres or in segregated areas within mostly white theatres. 
 
The film was rediscovered by California engineer David Navone, who found four reels of early 1910s films in a trunk he purchased at an estate sale. He subsequently gave them to the American Film Institute (AFI).  
 
The film was preserved with a Women’s Film Preservation Fund grant through AFI's National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center. It was then restored frame by frame, so that it could be shown publicly on July 29, 2018, at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles. 
 
It's no secret that nowadays Hollywood is a boys' club — only about 9% of the top 250 grossing films of 2012 were directed by women — but it hasn't always been that way. In fact, many of the highest-earning screenwriters in the early era of Hollywood were women, and women on screen were taking on diverse, complex roles. 
 
It isn't a stretch to say that having more women writing the scripts and calling the shots behind the scenes helped make films of Hollywood's Golden Age more interesting. It could be said that women like Alice Guy and other females of the Pioneer era paved the way for them. 
 
Some of the most innovative and influential directors of the early days of film made history alongside Alice Guy, including Frances Marion, a director and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter.  
 
She is considered a legend of the silent film era.  Another important figure is Marion E. Wong, a pioneer for Asian-American cinema and director and founder of Mandarin Film Company in Oakland, California, established in 1916.  

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