Alice Guy Blache: Lost Visionary of the Cinema

The Moving Picture News, 1912

‘It has long been a source of wonder to me that many women have not seized upon the wonderful opportunities offered to them by the motion-picture art to make their way to fame and fortune as producers of photodramas. Of all the arts there is probably none in which they can make such a splendid use of talents so much more natural to a woman than to a man and so necessary to its perfection.’

Alice Guy Blaché, 1914

Over a hundred years after she started making films (which was considerably earlier than D.W. Griffith, Mabel Normand, and Lillian Gish began their careers), the life and work of Alice Guy Blaché is still shrouded in myth and controversy.

Only a fraction (111) of the approximately one thousand films that she directed still exist, and almost half of these have been found very recently. The films are spread out in archives all over the world. Not all of them are available for viewing, even to scholars, and many of them are in desperate need of conservation and preservation.

It is widely agreed that she was the first woman filmmaker but there is considerable debate as to whether she made the first ever fiction film. She played a key role in early sound film production, and yet this part of her career is almost always ignored. She is, to this day, the only woman ever to have owned and run her own film studio. And yet she made her final film in 1920, at the age of 47, and died in New Jersey in 1968 – unacknowledged, unheralded, almost totally forgotten.

Ten years of painstaking research has enabled Alison McMahan to piece together the career of this extraordinary woman. What results is the first full-length treatment of Alice Guy Blaché’s work, the debunking of several long-standing myths about her and, ultimately, the emergence of a feminist figurehead of the filmmaking industry.