Alice Guy Blache: Lost Visionary of the Cinema

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, remarkable research
Review: This book is an amazing labor of love. I should admit that before reading it, I knew very little about the book's subject, Alice Guy. The same can clearly not be said of the author, Alison McMahan, who shows an extreme devotion to the work of her subject - not merely in picking through it, analysing it, explaining it, and bringing it to life, but in hunting it down in the first place.

Note that I referred to the author's devotion to the WORK of her subject. This is not a biography - more a loving excavation of the career of an extraordinary woman, with many personal details and anecdotes thrown in for good measure. But in the light of the recent survey I read which showed that only 5% of Hollywood films are directed by women (forgive me if I've got that figure wrong, but it was tiny, anyway), the career of Alice Guy seems utterly remarkable. The fact that this woman achieved so much in such a short space of time, in the very earliest days of the film industry, will truly make you stop and think.

I would willingly have given this book 5 stars, except for two reasons. First, there are a handful of typographical errors - for which I cannot blame the author, but they did irritate me; secondly, (and I'm being selfish here) I wanted to read more - and yet the end of the book is taken up with an enormous list of Alice Guy's films, which I am sure will be of great use to scholars, but left me feeling a tiny bit short-changed. But I'd hate to end on a negative note, so I'll say this: Alison McMahan has written a highly original and inspiring book, and I hope that many more people get to read it.

Rating:
Summary: THE FIRST FICTION FILMMAKER HAPPENED TO BE A WOMAN!
Review: This book will satisfy anyone wishing to learn two things: 1) How did the motion picture industry get started and its business develop; and 2) How was it possible for a woman to become a leader in pionering narrative film production in a FOR MEN ONLY world?

For starters, my recommendation is to purchase in addition to Ms. McMahan's book "The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blache" (a fairly brief but absolutely fascinating account of Alice Guy's life and adventures in her own words).

McMahan's book is scholarly -- but certainly not dry. This is a labor of love that had come out of the author's doctoral dissertation. During ten years of researech for her book, McMahan first followed the trail of Alice Guy in America, and then back to France (where Guy had been born), Germany and other regions of Europe where the pioneering filmmaker had worked. As a matter of fact, McMahan took a job teaching at a university in Holland for three years to complete her pursuit of Alice Guy life's story. The result is the reconstruction of the adventures of Alice Guy, a courageous young woman who dared to show a male dominated world how to write screen plays, and then use actors, sets and a motion picture camera to create an exciting story for the screen.

Most of what today we take for granted had been first done by Alice Guy Blache: narrative film (three reels long), colored film, sound synchronized film, special effects, animation. But life was never easy for Alice. She had married an Englishman, Herbert Blache (a cameraman), and then three days later the couple was ordered by their employer Lois Gaumont to travel to America for selling his motion picture equipment. At first, Alice didn't speak a word of English -- her new husband had to do all the talking. But soon she learned the language, and several years later she had raised $100,000 (the equivalent today of $25- to $50-billion!!) for build the then largest film studio in America in Fort Lee, New Jersey that Alice named Solax.

In 1910, Fort Lee had been the early home of American filmmaking. Several years later, in 1914 Alice's husband, who had begun to have affairs with actresses, sold her out by secretly selling a film "The Lure" (a story about the "White Slave" trade of prostitution) that she had produced for another studio to the studio head for $10,000. But within a month the film had made $300,000. Alice never got over it. This bit of chicanery illustrates how even the most creative and hard driving woman had very little control over her own property in those days. Eventually, Alice divorced the creep. But that made her life even more difficult. Divorced men could pick themsleves up and get back to work for earning a living. What about a woman having to care for her two young children in 1922?

The reason McMahan calls her heroin a "Lost Visionary" is that Alice Guy had been all but forgotten, until relatively recently. Prior to the arrival of this book, Anthony Slide -- the prominent film historian -- had chronicled the films of Alice Guy Blache. And indeed, by 1996 Alice's daughter Simone Blache had translated, and Anthony Slide edited, her mother's memoirs. So then why do we need another book? In fact, McMahan ties it all together and fills in the missing pieces of the Alice Guy puzzle not included in Slide's monograph and Alice's memoir.

This is an excellent read for anyone interested in how a turn of the century woman managed to cope with all kinds of obstacles put in her way by men who either envied and resented her talent, or simply wished to steal what she had created: more than 1,000 story films.

Discover the lost visionary of the cinema in Alison McMahan's well written and fascinating book.

Rating:
Summary: Blache Is Not Blase
Review: This hugely expansive book receives five stars for content, thoroughness of research, and plumbing of the depths of extant examples of Miss Guy Blache's memoirs and works ~ but not for reader-friendliness. The tone the author takes is most academic, which is understandable once you know that this ten-years-in-the-making, authorative benchmark biography began as a doctoral dissertation. Alison McMahan covers every square inch of Alice Guy Blache's life and her contributions to silent cinema, plus tosses in some fascinating asides regarding the origins of photography, film, and moving pictures. I found the chapter detailing the early mechanical photographic devises most absorbing, losing myself in such obscurities as the phenakitiscope, zoetrope, and praxinoscope. Miss Guy had the great good fortune to be French, living in France, the birthplace of photography, during the era of the embryonic beginnings of film. She got in on the ground floor, starting her career as secretary to Leon Gaumont, founder of the legendary Gaumont Laboratories, which co-liasoned with the also-famed Lumiere brothers, and held association with Melies. Guy, in her position with Gaumont, was allowed permission to dabble with cameras and film, which, very early on, led to the production of her own films, years before the turn of the 20th century. Guy is assumed, with some few facts to dispute this, to have produced the first fiction film and the first close up within a fiction film. Miss Guy was a prodigious director, churning out hundreds of films in all genres, first in France and then in the US at her Fort Lee Solax Studio. Her husband, Herbert Blache, devised a sound system known as the chronophone which could be rigged to synchronise a sound track with a projected film. Together they made productions to fit with this chronophone, a notoriously unreliable instrument, which more than anything else proved the eventual ruin of them. I recommend this book in conjunction with the biography of Lois Weber: The Director Who Lost Her Way in History. Read both of these books for a wonderful introduction to a sadly passed-over aspect of silent cinema, that of the era of the flourishing woman director, studio owner, and visionary. As such, both books succeed exceedingly.