Alice Guy Blaché: cinema pioneer
by Tom Ruffles
[ bookreviews ]
Alice Guy Blaché (1873-1968) was a significant film pioneer, often referred to as the first woman film director, whose full career has only been subjected to sustained critical scrutiny in recent years. She led an unusually interesting (and peripatetic) life, though perhaps one that ultimately failed to achieve its full promise.
Although Alice Guy was born in France, her family lived for many years in Chile and all her siblings were born there. She initially stayed with her grandmother in Switzerland before being taken to Santiago at the age of three or four. A couple of years later she was back in France for her schooling, but while there her father, a bookseller, was made bankrupt and died soon afterwards. Needing to find employment, Alice trained as a typist and stenographer, and after a short stint working for a varnish company was hired by Léon Gaumont in 1894 as a secretary. Gaumont at this point was working for a still photography company, but would shortly become famous as a pioneer in the nascent film industry. It was a case of being in the right place at the right time; she and Gaumont were present when the Lumière brothers demonstrated their Cinématographe on 22 March 1895. Having bought out his employer, Gaumont switched from the manufacture of equipment to film production, and Guy asked him if she could try her hand at it. Her boss agreed - as long as she did it in her own time.
This was the start of a highly productive period during which she either made or oversaw huge numbers of films of various kinds and of increasing ambition, including early sound films, called phonscènes. Unfortunately she married her cameraman, Herbert Blaché, and in 1907 accompanied him when Gaumont sent him to New York. In the US she ran her own company, Solax, first at Flushing, New York and then at Fort Lee, New Jersey. This was the high point of her professional life. Guy's company eventually merged with her husband's Blaché Features, but in a changing environment their business and personal lives became increasingly troubled. After years of escalating financial difficulties and estranged from her husband, her film career ended in 1920. That year she moved to California briefly, returned to Fort Lee to oversee the sale of the Solax plant, and promptly fled to Canada with her two children to escape a polio epidemic. She was back in France in 1922 and never worked in the industry again. After a spell in Switzerland, she returned to the United States in the 1940s where she worked on her memoirs, dying in New Jersey in 1968.
Guy today is presented as hidden from history, yet in her own lifetime she was celebrated as a pioneer in France. As early as 1954, Louis Gaumont (Léon's son) gave a speech in Paris on "Madame Alice Guy Blaché, the First Woman Filmmaker", who had been "unjustly forgotten." The following year she was awarded the Légion d'honneur, in 1957 she was honoured by the Cinémathèque française and in 1963 she was interviewed for a French television programme. Part of the reason for her more general obscurity outside France may thus be because she was French, and therefore a victim of American cultural hegemony. Apart from a few names such as Gaumont, Pathé, Méliès and the Lumières, French cinema pioneers are not particularly well known in the English-speaking world. There has been the loss of, and lack of availability of, many of Guy's films as well, but that alone does not seem to account adequately for the relative lack of interest in her outside France, nor for the lack of interest in the US in her Solax years. Part of the problem may have been a relative neglect by historians of filmmaking in the Eastern United States compared to what was happening in California. Even with the publication in 1976 of her memoirs the situation did not change markedly, and it was only when an edition, translated into English by her daughter Simone Blaché and daughter-in-law Roberta Blaché, appeared a decade later that there was an improvement in the state of affairs. Fortunately for scholars, Guy's reminiscences provided the foundation for much subsequent research as they were fairly reliable when dealing with her career.
Now the tide has turned with a vengeance and Alice Guy's work is being given the attention it deserves in the English speaking world. Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer, is a tie-in with an exhibition and programme of screenings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, organised by Joan Simon, the book's editor. It illustrates how much effort is currently being devoted to the discovery, preservation and analysis of Guy's surviving films. The exhibition brings together films from archives in Paris, the Library of Congress (which holds the largest number of her US-made films), and archives in seven other countries.
Alison McMahan's Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema (2002) is still to date the best account of Guy's life and career, and due praise is repeatedly accorded it in Cinema Pioneer. The new book is much thinner - 148 pages - and is made up mainly of a collection of rather bitty essays which even in such a short space contain a great deal of repetition. Joan Simon, 'Curator-at-large' at the Whitney, contributes a preface which begins "Cinema's first woman director...", and is mostly an extensive list of acknowledgements. She then sets the scene in a chapter entitled 'The Great Adventure: Alice Guy Blaché, Cinema Pioneer", which rather predictably begins, "Cinema's first woman director..." This sketches the time at Gaumont, touching on the phonoscènes (essentially early music videos, to which Guy contributed the visual element, an early example of playback) that she made between 1902 and 1906, and strays into her time in the USA.
Alan Williams goes into the beginning of her career in more depth in "Sage Femme of Early Cinema", "Sage Femme" being a play on the title of one of her films, Sage-femme de première classe (1902), as it means "midwife". He asks whether she was the first head of production for a major film company and concludes that although she possibly was, such questions are not terribly useful as these roles evolved gradually. She certainly fulfilled that function at Gaumont by the time she left in 1907. He highlights her comedic gift, the increasing complexity and ambition of her films, but how she failed to develop when in the US, where her style became outdated. The earthy humour he identifies, including a fondness for drag and an apparent oral fixation, are surely ripe for further analysis and comparison with her male contemporaries.
Alison McMahan writes on Madame Blaché in America: Director, Producer, Studio Owner, the title of which suitably sets out her stall. This chapter is partly drawn from Lost Visionary and also from a forthcoming biography of Guy she is writing. It focuses on the Solax years, and is rather technical compared to the other contributions as it describes the convoluted background to the development of the film industry in the United States in just a few pages. It deals with Guy's professional and personal relationship with her husband and the sad end of her life as a filmmaker at the age of only 47. Jane Gaines's brief article, lifted from an essay which appears in a forthcoming book called Genre and Gender, concentrates on a single two-minute film, Madame Blaché's Maternal Melodrama: New Love and the Old (1912), and unlike her fellow contributors adopts a high-flown film studies approach in which there is talk of the "metaphorical melos" and we are obscurely informed that there is "little 'discharge' or semiotic runoff even available to convert to other signs", etc. Naturally, while appearing to portray "patriarchal desire fulfilled", New Love and the Old in reality offers "perhaps infinite possibilities for subversion."
Charles Musser contributes a typically lively piece on The Wages of Feminism: Alice Guy Blaché and Her Late Feature Films. He looks at the Blachés as one of a number of high-profile couples working in Hollywood during the period, promoting themselves as egalitarian partnerships but subject to behind-the-scenes stresses that frequently resulted in divorce (Herbert and Alice divorced in 1922, after Alice had been subjected to years of her husband's philandering). Musser looks at the three surviving films of the forty plus they made together between 1916 and 1918 within the context of their declining financial position and her loss of confidence in her own abilities. He moves on to look at how she treats the figure of the male artist in her films, working through and sublimating her relationship with Herbert in acts of wish fulfilment: "Alice Blaché surely identified herself with the youthful, yearning women who are in danger of being seduced by men who would too soon discard them," but who, unlike Alice herself, successfully manage to resist their caddish advances.
The final piece, by Kim Tomadjoglou, is somewhat mistitled. Wonderment - Seeing the World Through the Eyes of Alice Guy Blaché suggests some kind of encomium. But after an introductory section which does perhaps overegg Guy's achievements, though noting that she is alone in having bridged two distinct phases in the development of film, the earliest period in France followed by the maturing of the form in the US in the 1910s, Tomadjoglou goes on to discuss the preservation and restoration of Solax films at the Library of Congress. She concludes with an examination of the earliest known extant Solax film, and the most recently acquired by the Library of Congress, Mixed Pets (1911). She mentions the unreliability of sources, which is fair, but then makes the preposterous statement that "This may not be such a bad thing, as it allows us to reinvent the landscape and the means by which we investigate and write the history of the cinema, a dialectical history that encompasses both the voices of the past and present in dialogue, in conversation." Those who feel that film historians cannot afford to be this blasé about their sources will be grinding their teeth at such sentiments.
In addition to the articles, there is a selected bibliography - this is probably the first time I have come across a book that is listed in its own bibliography - key events and dates (adapted from Lost Visionary), a list of extant films, an index and 'credits', which for some reason include a list of Whitney Museum staff as at 1 July 2009 (hi, guys!). The list of films is useful and up to date, but the editor made the decision to list films alphabetically rather than chronologically, which would have given a better idea of the shape of Guy's career, and where the gaps are. This list complements but does not supplant the Complete Filmography (listing films both extant and missing) in Lost Visionary of the Cinema which groups films into Gaumont Films, Sound Films (ie phonosceènes) and American Films.
The list of surviving films in Cinema Pioneer is a lot smaller than the complete filmography in Lost Visionary. However, Guy's films turn up all the time. At the time of her death she thought that only three had survived. When McMahan began studying her in 1992, about forty were known to exist, but by the publication of her book ten years later, close to 110 films had been found. The total currently stands at more than 130. Given that she directed somewhere in the region of a thousand, it is still a tiny fraction, but a survival rate no worse than for many filmmakers of the early period. Cinema Pioneer contains an up-to-date list of known films, with the archives holding them, and it gives details of where many of these can be found commercially. The Whitney has also placed a number of titles on YouTube. If she ever was a "Lost Visionary", she is not lost now. Productive, imaginative, able to survive in a tough, male-dominated environment, certainly; whether or not she can be regarded as a visionary, in the sense of extending the bounds of what is conceived to be possible, is another matter.
A problem with rewriting Guy into film history is that, by focusing on her, other pioneers are, if not effectively written out, then obscured. Apart from mentioning how fluid intellectual property rights were, with filmmakers 'borrowing' (or "paraphrasing", as Williams puts it) from each other shamelessly, there is little sense here of Guy as part of a community of filmmakers pushing the technical and aesthetic boundaries of the new medium year by year. An example of this is the description of Guy's La Vie du Christ, made in 1906. Guy is quoted in an interview saying, "In this film, I also did one of the first double exposures ever. I had Christ rising from his tomb. That was easy. I put him against a black velvet ground, then did a panoramic shot. The apparition looked like it was slowly rising upwards." One of the first it may have been in that it was a technique with limited application, but by 1906 it was old hat. George Albert Smith had done exactly the same thing in 1898 when he used black velvet to show the ghostly sibling in The Corsican Brothers. Now that Guy has been foregrounded so well, her work needs to be carefully compared to that being done by others in the same period in order to assess the value of her contribution.
Repeatedly through the book Guy is described as the first woman film director. She herself was convinced of this: Simon notes that Guy wrote about her career with "charm, clarity, assurance, and modesty, and she did the same in the interviews she gave late in life, about her role as the first woman filmmaker in the world, the only honour she granted for herself." Quite a big honour one might think. Guy also graciously accorded second place to Lois Weber, who didn't even join Gaumont until 1905. Unfortunately so much documentation concerning the early days of cinema has been lost and these issues are not clear cut. Even what would seem to be a straightforward matter like dating La Fée aux choux, of which Sage-femme de première classe is a remake, is problematic: it was made in 1896 according to Guy, but a contemporary Gaumont catalogue gave it a date of 1900, and which of these is correct is still a matter of dispute. We often cannot know if the received, and frequently repeated, wisdom is the full story, or even the right one. It is entirely possible that Ramsgate-born Laura Bayley, George Albert Smith's wife, was making films with him behind as well as in front of the camera from 1897 (documentation is lacking, but perhaps we can just follow Tomadjoglou and reinvent the landscape), and it is also likely that Bayley was directing 17.5mm Biokam films in 1900, so she is perhaps an outside contender for the honour Guy was so keen to accord herself, though there is no doubt that overall Guy's contribution to the industry was far more significant.
For a final view, Luke McKernan's verdict in his potted biography in the British Film Institute publication Who's Who of Victorian Cinema (1996) that she "has been perhaps over romanticised in some quarters, but she nevertheless had a remarkable career by any standards" is a fair one, though the romanticising shows no signs of abating.
