She systematically developed narrative filmmaking and pioneered several techniques. In those ten years she produced hundreds of films and created an effective studio system years before Hollywood did so. A woman in a man’s worldįrom 1896 to 1906, Alice worked as Gaumont’s head of production. In 1912, recalling this first instance of narrative fiction in film, Alice said that, “Before very long, every moving picture house in the country was turning out stories instead of spectacles and plots instead of panoramas.” He considered it something of a “girlish thing” to do, but he allowed her the use of a company studio and camera on the condition that her secretarial work didn’t suffer.Īlice continued to effectively run the office while producing and directing the world’s first narrative film, only a few minutes long, and a July newspaper of that year describes the result as a “chaste fiction of children born under the cabbages in a wonderfully framed chromo landscape.” The film is unfortunately now lost, although later films made by Alice with the same title, La Fée aux Choux, did survive, and managed to confuse film historians for some time. With characteristic bravado, she asked Gaumont for permission to make her own film. The film was simple - a shaky scene of workmen leaving the Lumière factory - but Alice was struck by the possibilities that projection offered and the opportunities it presented for incorporating narrative storytelling into film. Together with Gaumont, she attended the “surprise” Lumière event in March 1895, in which the Lumière brothers demonstrated the first use of film projection. She became acquainted with the short films that were made to demonstrate the cameras to clients and met other pioneers in the film business such as Auguste and Louis Lumière. A new vision for film makingĭuring her first months at the company, Alice became familiar with clients, marketing strategies, and the stock of cameras the company sold. It was the start of what would become, for Alice, a lifelong passion and successful career. Gaumont et Cie) it became one of the leading names in the relatively new motion-picture industry in France. The company manufactured cameras, and after Gaumont took over in 1895 (and changed the company name to L. Her first job was at a varnish factory, and in 1894 she began working as a secretary at the Comptoir Général de la Photographie, owned first by Felix-Max Richard and then by Léon Gaumont. Her mother struggled to get a job, and Alice trained as a typist and stenographer to help support her family. In 1891, when Alice was nearly eighteen, her father died of unknown causes. She attended school at Veyrier, and later, went to a convent school at Ferney with her sister Louise. She spent the next two years with her family in Santiago before returning to France. When her parents returned to Chile soon after her birth, Alice was left in the care of her grandmother in Switzerland.Īt the age of three, Alice returned to Chile.
The Guy family made their home in Santiago, Chile, where Alice’s four siblings were born and where Emile ran a bookshop and publishing company.Ī smallpox epidemic in 1872 compelled the family to emigrate to France, where Alice was born the following year. When she died in 1968, many of her accomplishments had been erased from male-dominated film history books, but recent years have seen a revival of interest in her life and work.Īlice Ida Antoinette Guy was born in Paris to a Chilean father, Emile Guy, and a French mother, Marie Clotilde Franceline Aubert. Guy-Blaché directed, produced, or supervised about a thousand films, many of them short. One of the first filmmakers to make a narrative film, she was the only known female filmmaker in the world from 1896 to 1906.
Alice Guy-Blaché (J– March 24, 1968) was a pioneering filmmaker of the early days of cinema, and the first woman to direct a film.
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