written BY fiona FORTUnATO

Alice Guy Blaché was born Alice Ida Antoinette Guy on the first of July 1873 in the eastern suburbs of Paris. While her career started out as merely being the secretary to an inventor, she would go on to be described by The Moving Pictures News in 1911 as “a fine example of what a woman can do if given a square chance in life.” But her success was not merely by chance or luck: talent and ambition led her to be the first woman filmmaker as well as a pioneer in her own right in the budding film industry of Paris. Over her career she acted as the director, producer or supervisor of nearly 1,000 films. 

At the age of 22 the trajectory of Blaché’s career was set into motion. At the time she had been working for the inventor Léon Gaumont in Paris. As his secretary she began helping him to make short films that she would often be featured in, after he had begun manufacturing motion picture cameras. While the initial purpose of these films was just to demonstrate to his clients the use of the cameras, Blaché felt that they could be made better. These films posed the entry to her creative career and, with Gaumont’s permission, she was permitted to direct a few scenes on the sole condition that it would not interrupt or interfere with her office work. Her artistic pursuits were not solely bound to film, but included photography to express her creativity as she developed her artistic style early in her career. She would attend classes on photography with avant garde photographers like Frédéric Dellay as well as experimenting with X-ray photographs in the example of Wilhelm Röntgen. 

Blaché’s very first film was made in 1896, titled “La Fée aux Choux” or the “Cabbage Fairy”. After her first film, it was not long before she was appointed as the head of film production at the Gaumont company. There she was able to supervise and produce hundreds of films as well as aiding in developing a studio system organization before the emergence of Hollywood as we know it today. Blaché worked hands-on, coloring some of her films by hand as well as helping to create a sound system that could sync visuals with pre-recorded wax cylinders. 

In 1907, Alice Guy married Herbert Blaché who also worked for Léon Gaumont, and she resigned as head of film production in order to accompany him to the U.S.. In 1910 she formed Solax Company (the first film company owned by a woman) to continue to make her own movies, and in 1912 she established a studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey which at the time had a vibrant film community. She would scout sites  for shooting on horseback or by car, managed a menagerie of animal performers (including a 600 lb tiger named Princess) and even once refused an invitation to witness an execution at Sing Sing Prison in New York.  

Her films at Solax would include comedies like “Consequences of Feminism” (1906), a  silent comedy directed by Blaché which played upon a role reversal of the sexes, as well as producing melodramas like “Les Feuilles Chéant” (1912), and westerns like “Greater Love Hath No Men” (1911) and “Two Little Rangers” (1912).

  “Two Little Rangers”,a comedy western, reflected the tenacity of Blaché’s character through her filmmaking as well as through the expression of a feminist sentiment, which can be seen in the two central female characters that are driven and self-assured. In 1912, she made what is acknowledged to be the first film starring an entirely African American cast of actors. The film was titled “A Fool and His Money”, and was about the fleeting friendships that come when an individual comes into money and how quickly they dissipate when the money runs out. 

In 1922 Solax and Blaché’s other studios had to be auctioned off to pay off debts due to financial troubles resulting from the mismanagement of her husband, Herbert. That same year the couple would finalize their divorce, and Alice Guy Blaché would move back to France with her two children. She attempted to rejoin the film industry in Paris, but unfortunately with the industry's growing success came the shoving out of women from filmmaking roles that they previously might have been able to experiment in without hostility. 

While ultimately she was unsuccessful in reviving her film career in France, she switched to the solace of writing children's stories and parts of her memoir. In her later life she attempted to collect her work which had been the dominant passion of her life, but unfortunately could only regain three films out of the 1,000 that she had worked on. She died at the age of 94 in the U.S. after an illustrious career, but without being able to reunite herself with her immense body of work. 

Her legacy has been revived by historians examining the often overlooked role of women who, while often forgotten, were extremely formative, serving as pioneers in their respective industries. While Alice Guy Blaché admitted “My youth, my inexperience, my sex…all conspired against me” she was still an immensely successful filmmaker in spite of the barriers of her time and her sex. She was not merely a blip on the radar of the film world, but aided in the formation of the groundwork for the emerging industry of French and U.S. cinema well before Hollywood was the central hub of production. Now more than a century on, the first female director/producer can be fully acknowledged and appreciated in light of the full impact she had upon the evolution of the film industry.