She handled that responsibility excellently, even as a woman in a man's world, even as an immigrant wife and mother in a man's world. But America was a different story-people weren't as hidebound by tradition there.Īlice Guy-Blaché arrived in the United States to supervise Gaumont's American distribution. So she was forced to resign her post as Gaumont's head of production. Married women didn't work, not in France at least. Getting married to Blaché, though, derailed her burgeoning career.
It was at this point that she met cameraman Herbert Blaché, a younger man (by almost ten years) who caught her eye on the set one day. She started hiring-and training-new directors to join her team, and launched the careers of the likes of Louis Feuillade and Victor Jassenet. She experimented with recording soundtracks on disks to synchronize sound with her films, and explored the possibilities of special effects. Soon, she was making elaborate long form productions.
That being said, as any fan of You Tube or Twitter can attest, there are many things a clever person can do in the short form-and Guy started to push the limits. The stories were modest at first, naturally enough, given the fact that movies typically ran no more than a minute in those days. Except, she didn't just point the camera at things happening. He asked his secretary, Alice Guy (not yet Guy-Blaché) to take that job. Gaumont expected to make films like these, but running the company was busy work, and he needed an underling to go out and point the camera at things that happened. This was a time when most movies consisted of nothing more than pointing a camera at some event that happened: a man getting shaved, a baby eating some oatmeal, some workers leaving their jobs at the end of a day. In 1897, he decided to start making his own movies, too.
A house divided cast movie#
Her story begins with Leon Gaumont, a French engineer selling movie equipment and film. Men could not claim some historical privilege in this brand new arena-it was one place where women might be able to compete on equal footing. This was a brand new industry, and it was rare to find anyone with such accomplishments. It was rare to find a woman with such accomplishments-but that was partly her point when she encouraged women to seek employment in the movie business. She was the person who nurtured the careers of some of early cinema's most prominent directors, she pioneered narrative storytelling in film, she made sound films (in the 1890's!), she made the first film with an all-African-American cast, she built her own studio. Alice Guy-Blaché was one of the very first movie moguls of them all. When we say that Alice Guy-Blaché was the first female movie mogul, however, we do her memory a grave disservice.
Between the lines of her words you can hear her frustration-having blazed a trail, she turned around and looked behind her, only to despair that no one seemed to be following. The woman who wrote those words was a pioneering woman executive-the first female movie mogul, among other laudable firsts. "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." Those words were written in 1914, several generations before women executives started advising one another to "lean in." "There is no doubt in my mind that a woman's success in many lines of endeavor is still made very difficult by a strong prejudice against one of her sex doing work that has been done only by men for hundreds of years."
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