She directed the first story ever put on film. The men who ran cinema’s history gave her work away.
She was hired as a secretary at a camera company in Paris. She asked her boss if she might write “one or two little scenes” and film them, so long as it did not interfere with her typing. He agreed, expecting nothing.
She then invented the fiction film and ran the world’s first film studio for eleven years. When the industry wrote its own history, it left her out and handed her films to men.
Her name was Alice Guy-Blaché.
The secretary who built narrative cinema
Alice Guy was born near Paris on July 1, 1873. In 1894 she went to work for Léon Gaumont at the company that would become the Gaumont Film Company, one of the first studios on earth. Most early films were one-minute records of real life: trains arriving, workers leaving factories, parades passing. Guy saw something no one was doing. She wanted to tell a story.
Around 1896 she made La Fée aux Choux, “The Cabbage Fairy.” It is widely considered one of the first narrative fiction films ever made, and by many accounts the first.
One honest caveat belongs here, because this archive does not inflate. The exact date of that first film is contested. Guy placed it in 1896, ahead of Georges Méliès; some historians date it as late as 1900. What is not contested is the scale of what followed. She became Gaumont’s head of production and directed nearly every film the company made until 1905. She experimented with double exposures, hand-tinted color, the dramatic close-up, and synchronized sound on Gaumont’s Chronophone system, making more than 150 sound films years before Hollywood claimed the idea.
In 1910 she crossed the Atlantic and founded her own studio, Solax, in Fort Lee, New Jersey. As its president she directed dozens of films and supervised hundreds more. In 1912 she made A Fool and His Money, one of the first narrative films with an all-Black cast. Over her career she is credited with a hand in roughly a thousand films.
How the record was rewritten
The erasure was not a single act. It was an accumulation, and it has names.
Her husband, cameraman Herbert Blaché, started a rival studio in his own name in 1913 and funneled Solax’s resources into it. The company she built wound down and closed. In 1918 he left for Los Angeles with a younger actress, and Guy-Blaché, needing the work, was reduced to serving as an assistant to her estranged husband. Credit for founding Solax was later assigned to him.
Then the historians finished the job. As the decades passed, Guy-Blaché discovered that her accomplishments had vanished from the record or, in Britannica’s own words, been “credited to one of her male colleagues.” Films she had directed at Gaumont were reassigned to the men who had worked under her. And when Léon Gaumont wrote the history of his own company, the man whose studio she had run for over a decade largely left her out of his memoirs.
She was not a footnote who got lost. She was the head of production written out of the company’s official account of itself.
She fought it, and mostly lost
Guy-Blaché did not accept the silence. She wrote to historians and journalists to correct the record when her films were credited to men. She drafted a history of Gaumont’s early years that never reached publication. She gave lectures. She wrote extensive memoirs to set the story straight.
The memoirs were not published in her lifetime. Of the roughly one thousand films she touched, only about 140 survive today, many in fragments. The French government awarded her the Legion of Honour in 1953, a late and partial gesture toward a career it had allowed to disappear. She died in New Jersey in 1968, at ninety-four, before her own account of her life reached print.
The reversal
The record is slowly being corrected, which is the point of keeping one.
In 2018, filmmaker Pamela B. Green released Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, narrated by Jodie Foster and named for the sign Guy-Blaché hung on the walls of Solax to direct her actors. It reconstructed her filmography and put her name back on her own work for a new audience.
The films are still mostly gone. The histories that gave them away are still on library shelves. But the woman who filmed the first story is no longer a secretary in the margins of someone else’s memoir.
History has gaps. We fill them. Enter the archive.
Sources:
- Alice Guy-Blaché — Encyclopædia Britannica
- Alice Guy-Blaché: female filmmaking pioneer — ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image)
- La Fée aux Choux — Wikipedia (on the contested date of the first film)