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Information about the work and context of creation

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. 

Indications

Between the years of 1900 and 1907, Alice Guy was busy creating the first music videos using  the newly invented “chronophone” recording technology, by which singers were filmed lip-syncing to a pre-recorded playback where music was synchronized with the moving picture.  
 
These productions were made 30 years before Hollywood introduced the “talkies' to the world.  The Trottins Polka (1905) film, is a sound-on-disc phonoscene of 2min. and 25 secs by Alice Guy, recorded using the aforementioned chronophone recording which featured the voice of the singer Felix Mayol. 
 
A singer of comic songs, Félix Mayol, was a star of café-concerts and cabaret performances, in short, he was  a contemporary idol of popular entertainment who adopted a camp and effeminate manner on stage as part of his theatrical persona. 
 The 30 preserved  Phonoscènes filmed by Guy are unique not just for their contribution to cinematic history, but also in terms of the stars they featured, including three major Belle Époque celebrities in France: Polin, Félix Mayol, and Dranem. 
 
 
La Polka des Trottins was a 1902 hit, and featured music by Henri Christiné, a composer who also wrote music for Maurice Chevalier and Vincent Scotto- and A. Trebitsch. The song itself seems to centre around the culture of young boys who would loiter around railroad stations hoping to pick up tips for helping tourists with their luggage.  
Given that Mayol was apparently gay, and that young boys at railroad stations sometimes made money in less savoury ways, this song may have certain risqué undertones. Similar to his previous works, Mayol communicates the humour of the song subtly through the power of suggestion, rather than through obvious references. 
In Alice Guy’s film, the artist walks onto the stage, sings and then leaves the stage to converse with the audience for a while, he then comes back to greet them exactly in the fashion of a Café-concert of the times.  The image is shot in black and white, and the camera is positioned further back to give us a full view of the actor and a section of the studio floor. This latter is probably because the performer performed a small dance routine and needed more room to move around on camera. The film thus aimed for perfect documentary quality. 
It's no secret that nowadays Hollywood is a boys' club, with only about 9% of the top 250 grossing films of 2012 being directed by women, however, 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 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.  
 
The director and film editor Dorothy Arzner was California-born, gay and feminist and was active between the period of 1919 until the late 1940s. Arzner was a fixture in Hollywood who unlike many, was able to find success in both silent and "talkie" films.  
 
Other names of note include: Germaine Dulac, Helena Cortesina, Lois Weber, Rosario Pi, Mabel Normand, Elena Jordi, Marie-Louise Iribe, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, Musidora and Mary Ellen Bute. They all directed dramas, comedies, animation, avant-garde or fantastical films. Pushing the limits of storytelling and aesthetics, their films were courageous, inventive and exciting, and without them, the art of filming would be entirely different. 

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