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, they were heirs of the Alice Guy and Pioneer era films .
Some of the most innovative and influential directors of the early days of film history together with Alice Guy include Frances Marion, director, two-time Academy Award winning screenwriter, she was a legend of the silent film era; Marion E. Wong, pioneer for Asian-American cinema, director and founder of Mandarin Film Company in Oakland, California before 1920; the director and film editor Dorothy Arzner, California-born, gay and feminist, Arzner was a fixture in Hollywood that unlike many, Arzner was able to find success in both silent and "talkie" films; Germaine Dulac, Helena Cortesina, Lois Weber, Rosario Pi, Mabel Normand, Elena Jordi, Marie-Louise Iribe, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, Musidora, Dorothy Arzner, Mary Ellen Bute. They directed dramas, comedies, animation, avant-garde or fantastic…. Pushing the limits of storytelling and aesthetics, their films were courageous, inventive and exciting. Without them, the whole art of filming would have been different.
https://filmand.es/las-que-abrieron-camino-directoras-pioneras-del-cine-espanol-i/
Alice Ida Antoinette Guy
(Alice Guy-Blaché)
Saint-Mande, Val-de-Marne, France 01-07-1873 ‖ New Jersey 24-03-1968
Period of activity: From 1894 until 1922
Geographical classification: Europe > France
Socio-cultural movements
Late modern period / Contemporary period > Movements in cinema > Film pioneers (until 1908)
Groups by dedication
Plastic, visual and performing artists > Cinema directors / Producers
Plastic, visual and performing artists > Actresses
Popularisers / Cultural promoters > Producers (cinema and theatre)
Context of feminine creation
Review
Alice Guy-Blaché (France 1873 - USA 1964) is considered one of the first filmmaker to systematically develop narrative filmmaking in the history of cinema. She was in the room when the Lumière brothers held the first ever cinema screening in Paris and immediately saw its potential for telling stories. The following year, she was making her own fictional films and helped write the rules of this brand new medium. She incorporated now-standard techniques such as editing, primitive special effects and hand-tinted colour and she was the first who created music videos where music was synchronized. In 1906 Alice produced what was considered the longest film for that time. She made — directed, produced or supervised (often doing triple duty) — about 1,000 films.
Activities
Spanish
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¡Abracadabra!… y las pioneras reaparecen. Sesión 1 de 3: Construcción del zoótropo.
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¡Abracadabra!… y las pioneras reaparecen. Sesión 2 de 3: Haciendo reaparecer a las pioneras.
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¡Abracadabra!… y las pioneras reaparecen. Sesión 3 de 3: “Yo rescaté a…”
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Personaje misterioso semanal-4
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Tamaños de plano que narran: reversionando a Alice Guy.
Justifications
Biography
Alice Ida Antoinette Guy was born on July 1st, 1873 in Saint-Mandé, France. She was the youngest of four daughters of a Parisian businessman and spent part of her early childhood in Chile before being educated in Paris. Her father died when she was quite young, and she saw shorthand typing as a means to financial independence. It was through her mother's charity committee work that Guy met Léon Gaumont in 1895 and was taken on by him as a secretary at his still-photography company. She was in the room when the Lumière brothers held the first ever cinema screening, in Paris in March 1895. By the following year, she was making her own films. And while the Lumières were still hung up on cinema as a technological spectacle, Guy-Blaché immediately saw its potential for telling stories. Even her 60-second debut, The Cabbage Fairy, had a fictional narrative (a fairy conjures babies from cardboard cabbages). As time went on, Guy-Blaché helped write the rules of this brand new medium. She incorporated now-standard techniques such as editing, primitive special effects and hand-tinted colour and invented the music video, back in 1905, with her use of newfangled “chronophone” technology, by which singers were filmed lip-syncing to a pre-recorded playback. These productions were made 30 years before Hollywood introduced the “talkies” to the world. Guy-Blaché began as in-house film-maker for France’s Gaumont pictures, where she was producing, writing, directing, casting, and set design and in 1906, Alice produced what was considered the longest film for that time. In 1907, she married Anglo-French Gaumont cameraman Herbert Blaché and in 1907 they went to manage the Gaumont office in Cleveland. In 1910, having given birth to a daughter and keen to return to filmmaking, Guy founded her own production company, Solax. She made more than 1,000 films, including comedies, westerns and dramas, many of which put women to the fore and in 1912, when she was pregnant with her second child, she built her own studio complex in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the center of American filmmaking prior to the establishment of Hollywood. She made the transition to feature production, both at Solax and later freelancing. She also made the first all-African-American film: 1912’s A Fool and His Money and “Algie the Miner” (1912), a gay-themed western amongs others.
Her husband ran off to Los Angeles with an actress and Guy rebounded as a director-for-hire on films such as 1918’s The Great Adventure starring Bessie Love. Louis Feuillade, Ferdinand Zecca, Lois Weber, among many others, all passed through Guy’s studio doors on one continent or the other, exposed to her revolutionary acting philosophy: “Be Natural.”
Behind the scenes, her life was no less exciting. She took paraffin injections to plump up her cheeks in order to improve her appearance on film. She raised a son and daughter, once escaping to Canada to avoid an outbreak of polio. During World War I, she spent time in North Carolina volunteering for the Red Cross and nursing her children through measles. Once in Chicago, one of them was kidnapped for a few hours and afterward she bought a handgun for protection. She recovered from the Spanish Flu, a pandemic that claimed up to fifty million lives worldwide, including those of four Solax employees. The Blachés were divorced in 1922, Alice returning to France. She wrote some children's books and received the Legion d'Honneur in 1953. Guy began her own memoirs, although they went unpublished until eight years after her death. She returned to the United States in 1964 to live with one of her daughters and died in a nursing home in Mahwah, New Jersey.
Works
English
The Cabbage Fairy (1896) - La Fée aux Choux
The Trottins Polka (1905) - Felix Mayol - Alice Guy Blache - Phonoscene
A Fool And His Money 1912 - Alice Guy Blaché (The first narrative film with an all Black cast!)
Bibliography
McMahan, Alison (2003) Alice Guy Blaché:: Lost Visionary of the Cinema
Southampton: Continuum Publication
Simon, Joan (2009) Alice Guy Blache: Cinema Pioneer Yale: SERIES Whitney Museum of American Art PUBLISHER Yale University Press
Blaché, Roberta (1996) The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché Paperback Lanham: Scarecrow Press (May 7, 1996) ISBN-10 : 081083104X ISBN-13 : 978-0810831049
Aliceguyblanche (30/10/21) http://www.aliceguyblache.com/ © McMahan, Alison (2018) . All rights reserved.
Didactic approach
Film studies, Art, Art history.