{"id":131629,"date":"2018-12-07T09:00:57","date_gmt":"2018-12-07T14:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=131629"},"modified":"2018-12-07T15:24:14","modified_gmt":"2018-12-07T20:24:14","slug":"the-forgotten-mother-of-cinema","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/12\/07\/the-forgotten-mother-of-cinema\/","title":{"rendered":"The Forgotten Mother of Cinema"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Filmmaker Alice Guy-Blach\u00e9 speaking with actress Bessie Love, on set of The Great Adventure<\/i>. [courtesy Anthony Slide]<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1895, at the Societe d\u2019Encouragement pour l\u2019Industrie Nationale in Paris, Auguste and Louis Lumiere debuted the <\/em>cinematographe to a small group of colleagues and friends. The camera was officially released to the public later that year, and the Lumiere brothers become known as the fathers of cinema. Present for the private release was Alice Guy-Blach\u00e9, the twenty-two-year-old secretary to Leon Gaumont, inventor, industrialist, and founder of the Gaumont Film Company. He had been concerned about Alice\u2019s youth when he hired her. \u201cIt will pass,\u201d she assured him. <\/em><\/p>\n

Inspired by the screening, Alice Guy-Blach\u00e9 wrote, directed, and produced one of the first narrative films ever made,<\/em> La F\u00e9e Aux Choux, or, <\/em>The Cabbage Fairy, in 1896. Gaumont permitted her to use the company\u2019s equipment under the condition that \u201cthe mail doesn\u2019t suffer.\u201d This film, in which babies are plucked from cabbages by a fairy, cements Alice as one of the first filmmakers in history, and the first ever female film director\u2014a mother to cinema. <\/em><\/p>\n

Guy-Blach\u00e9\u2019s career outpaces that of legends like the Lumieres and Georges M\u00e9lies, with whom she was a contemporary. At the 1900 Exposition Universelle, Alice won the Diplome De Collaboratrice (Collaborator Award). Her competition included Melies, Ferdinand Zecca, and Edwin S. Porter. She wrote, directed, and produced over a thousand films and was among the first to employ techniques like close-ups, hand-tinted color, and synchronized sound. Many of her films were created through Solax, the production company she founded in 1910 in Fort Lee, New Jersey, (America\u2019s original Hollywood) in 1910, three years after moving to the United States with her husband, Herbert Blach\u00e9. For Alice, to become a filmmaker, \u201cwas my fate, if you will.\u201d And she was, at the time, well-known for it. <\/em><\/p>\n

Why, then, had I never heard of her?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

I studied film as an undergraduate at NYU, and yet, the first mention of Alice Guy-Blach\u00e9 I can recall was one month ago at the Telluride Film Festival. A friend familiar with the program (and all things cinema) recommended that I see\u00a0<\/em>Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blach\u00e9, a documentary. So I filed into the Masons Hall theater where Pamela B. Green, the film\u2019s writer, director, producer, and editor shielded herself from applause with the hood of her sweatshirt while the executive producer, Geralyn White Dreyfous, told the audience the film had been ten years in the making. Dreyfous described the film and Pamela\u2019s work with difficulty, as if she couldn\u2019t possibly articulate the magnitude of what we were about to see. She described it as the slow, piece-by-piece discovery of a vanished, invaluable archive. <\/em><\/p>\n

In the film, Green describes seeing Alice Guy-Blach\u00e9 mentioned on a television show about female pioneers of cinema. Previously unaware of Guy-Blach\u00e9, Pamela began researching to discover that while a few experts of Guy-Blach\u00e9 existed, other experts on cinema, like Peter Bogdanovich, Julie Delpy, Robert Redford, and dozens more featured in <\/em>Be Natural had never heard of her. The baffling disappearance of this once widely recognized cinematic trailblazer led Green to a reckoning with the world that had neglected her. <\/em><\/p>\n

Be Natural\u00a0will be screening from December 7\u00a0to 13 at the Metrograph<\/a> in New York City. Recently, I spoke with Pamela B. Green about the mammoth task of proving Alice Guy-Blach\u00e9\u2019s legacy, and the obstacles\u2014which she, like Alice, refused to linger on.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Filmmaker Alice Guy-Blach\u00e9 (on camera platform behind camera tripod) on set of The Life of Christ<\/i>, 1906 (Courtesy of Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 fran\u00e7aise de photographie)<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How did your initial interest in Alice Guy-Blach\u00e9 spin out into the making of a feature-length documentary?<\/p>\n

GREEN<\/p>\n

At first, I was surprised\u2014why had I never heard of her? I was shocked mostly by how much she had accomplished. How could such an important figure in the birth of cinema not be known? Under my breath I said, Wow. After a bit of thought, I said, Well, I\u2019m not surprised. So, of course, I looked her up, I started asking around. I kept thinking about it.<\/p>\n

In my day job, I get hired to work on opening sequences for films, sometimes by a studio, sometimes by a director. If they don\u2019t have the budget to shoot something or they need to tell a backstory, I specialize in helping with that kind of creative storytelling. It might involve editorial work, shooting original footage, finding archival or stock footage, et cetera. Some years back, I had the chance to work with Robert Redford. I asked him if he had ever heard of Alice, and he was a deer in headlights. He said, I lived in France and was going to art school and I can\u2019t believe I don\u2019t know about her. I said, Well I think we should make a documentary. There is so much to explore with the new way of research. I think that was around 2010. I had been researching Alice for some time already and from there I started putting the pieces together, step-by-step, you know, putting a trailer together, looking for funding. Everyone in Hollywood said it was suicide, we would never get the money, nobody would care, blah blah blah\u2014a lot of discouragement. But I don\u2019t like hearing no. I like to turn a no into a yes.<\/p>\n

Robert Redford came on board, and so did Jodie Foster\u2014it was a no-brainer for her. Everyone involved was at the top of their game. The funding was the most difficult part.<\/p>\n

It was a lot out of pocket for myself, and I didn\u2019t think twice about it. There were so many different hurdles, not only to tell the story, but to collect the materials worldwide, to write the story. We had to keep finding new things to show both funders and the world that there is something here. This is going to change things.<\/p>\n

It was a very long process of searching, negotiating, tedious researching in different languages and identifying new materials where her name might have been misspelled or just initialed in the records, things that were found in people\u2019s garages.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There are a few scenes in the film where you are uncovering connections between Alice and her living descendants, and discovering valuable records and artifacts in doing so. Some, like Tatiana Page-Relo, Alice\u2019s great-great-granddaughter, are surprised to hear that Alice lived in the states. Alice\u2019s granddaughter\u2019s widower, Bob Channing, invited you to Show Low, Arizona where you both discovered boxes of Alice\u2019s negatives. He gave them over to you saying, \u201cI can let you take these and you don\u2019t even have to give them back. No one\u2019s going to ever care.\u201d<\/p>\n

GREEN<\/p>\n

Yes! Everything is condensed in the film, but in real life it was a lot of me asking, Have you had a chance to look in the attic? and the other person insisting, No, I don\u2019t have anything there. Everybody told me they didn\u2019t have anything and I was like, Hmm \u2026 yes, you do. Pushing, pushing, and besides finding new material, you have to find films. You have to locate them in the different archives. Stuff needs to be digitized, which is extremely expensive.<\/p>\n

Two weeks before Cannes, we were licensing a piece of material from a French archive and they said, Oh we have these glass photos from The Birth, The Life, and The Death of Christ<\/em>, do you want them? And I was like, What\u2014what do you mean? Of course. But those are seven hundred euros. I don\u2019t think that people realize what\u2019s involved in not only getting her films but the transfer costs, the licensing, et cetera. It\u2019s basically paving the way to make her work accessible for future generations. The glass photos prove that she was the director of The Life of Christ<\/em>.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In the documentary, you talk about how many films, like\u00a0The Birth, The Life, and The Death of Christ<\/em>\u00a0(1906) and her first film, The Cabbage Fairy<\/em>,\u00a0were erroneously attributed to other directors. And in the case of a film like The Misadventures of a Calf\u2019s Head<\/em>, Alice was credited where it was not due, which enraged her. With so much misattribution, how did you draw a navigable map to deciphering Alice\u2019s oeuvre?<\/p>\n

GREEN<\/p>\n

There are a lot of sliding doors and Greek tragedy around this woman. But materials like the glass photos solve the problem of whether Alice was the director or not. I think when you make a documentary you have to be very selfless. You have to really look at the subject and listen to what they are saying. I watched her interviews, I read her memoirs, and I made a spreadsheet of every single thing she said to address all of her needs. I went after every single thing, one by one, because I don\u2019t think it was ever done that way, for her.<\/p>\n

With academics, the subject is a pizza, and they take on a slice, they don\u2019t take on the whole. I was really interested in the whole. That was the only way she was going to be really known and not just a piece of academic information. I wanted her to have a face, I wanted her to be humanized, and I wanted her to be known to the masses.<\/p>\n

For much of her work, I had to prove it. A lot of people think, Oh, did she really do this? We don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Does belief in the importance of Alice\u2019s work vary regionally?<\/p>\n

GREEN<\/p>\n

A lot of Americans have done research on her, more than the French. The French are the naysayers and I think this was her problem. The French didn\u2019t necessarily believe her. They used her documents, but they didn\u2019t really make a moment for her. To their credit, the films were not really available, but at the same time, they didn\u2019t do their research. And this didn\u2019t just happen to her, it happened to many people at that point, at that time, in that era. It was good and bad for her at the same time.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

But you believed her.<\/p>\n

GREEN<\/p>\n

I believed her. I had some doubts here and there, but when I checked, ninety-five percent of the time what she said checked out, it identified as correct. It was kind of creepy. I was checking and the more that was correct, the more I wondered what else I could find. It became this obsession. I was determined.<\/p>\n

My grandmother was my best friend, and she passed away right before we launched the Kickstarter for the film. Because of our connection, I love older people. I think their shell is one thing, but inside, they\u2019re young and vivacious and they have lived and accomplished so many things. I\u2019m always interested in their stories and what they\u2019ve gone through, especially women. I would usually brush these things under the carpet\u2014how difficult things have been for me as a woman in the industry. In the past, I just ignored it and kept going. I never stopped to think, Wow, that\u2019s really bad. I think I was in denial in a way. Working with Alice pushed me to say some of these things out loud. It is not okay.<\/p>\n

When you work on biographies, you\u2019re trying to create justice for the person you\u2019re covering, and you wouldn\u2019t be human if they didn\u2019t have an effect on you as well. She definitely had an effect on me.<\/p>\n

I love solving mysteries. Growing up I was big into Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, Murder She Wrote<\/em>, Columbo<\/em>, all of those things. I don\u2019t like it when people don\u2019t get the justice that they deserve. I fought for her. I did it through my work. I feel like I\u2019ve done everything she\u2019s asked for.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What types of things, specifically, did you feel Alice was asking for?<\/p>\n

GREEN<\/p>\n

She wanted to find her films. There is a parallel in the movie where she is looking and I\u2019m looking. She wanted to prove that she made The Birth, Life, and Death of Christ<\/em>. The 1896 film of The Cabbage Fairy <\/em>is tough, because it doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Yes, the documentary shows a remake from 1899.<\/p>\n

GREEN<\/p>\n

To me, the fact that she remade it again and again, as well as featured it in her other projects\u2014such as the babies being born in the cabbages in Madame Has a Craving <\/em>in 1906\u2014it just doesn\u2019t make any sense that the original wouldn\u2019t have been from 1896. Compare it today. If you get a new piece of technology to play with, you\u2019re not going to wait six years to ask your boss to do something. And she is already playing with the Lumieres\u2019s flipping image device, the Kinora, in 1895.\u00a0It\u2019s not just about being the first filmmaker, the first anything, it\u2019s about being there at the beginning and developing a medium, furthering the possibilities of what it can become.<\/p>\n

It was like she was in a lab testing, testing, testing all of these different ways that you can do something, and pushing the medium that we use today forward. To be there at the start is always hard. There are so many bugs and difficulties, forget about the equipment. She ignored the obstacles, and pursued the possibilities. And she was talented.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

And she was funny. In your film, director Kevin Macdonald says that YouTube movies are in their infancy in the same way that the Lumieres\u2019s or Guy-Blach\u00e9\u2019s first films were. \u201cThey are no more sophisticated in their grammar or their style.\u201d Media scholar Henry Jenkins remarks on the similarity of the content in films from the early twentieth century to the digital era\u2014both include stunts, trained animals, trips around the world. Andy Samberg comments on the remarkable similarity between The Irresistible Piano <\/em>from 1907 and his When Will The Bass Drop? <\/em>from 2014.<\/p>\n

GREEN<\/p>\n

When I first found her films, I thought, Wow, this is just like YouTube, but I had to find the right people to put that on screen. I had a lot of historians arguing, saying, No, no it\u2019s not.\u00a0I felt I had to put things in there that would make it relatable for a younger audience, because silent cinema isn\u2019t relatable unless you have some kind of connective tissue.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Guy-Blach\u00e9 was responsible for one of the first films featuring an entirely black cast, A Fool and His Money\u00a0<\/em>(1912). Filmmaker Ava DuVernay says that while this film was definitely of its time and not necessarily progressive, it is historically important for its inclusion of black actors. Shall The Parents Decide<\/em>\u00a0(1916) tackles sexual inequality and reproductive rights. It\u2019s a film about planned parenthood, written by Alice and activist Rose Pastor Stokes, meant to be screened at birth control advocate Margaret Sanger\u2019s clinic opening. But Margaret was arrested the minute the clinic opened. Sir Ben Kingsley called Guy-Blach\u00e9 a genuine storyteller, and said of her, \u201cYou realize watching her films how little has changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

GREEN<\/p>\n

These films show you that history is cyclical, and we are not doing anything really new. We are experiencing a continuation of things that happened a long time ago.\u00a0A Fool and His Money<\/em>\u2019s cast was meant to include white actors, but they all refused to work with actors of color. She didn\u2019t care. She said, Okay, forget that, let\u2019s do it this way, and proceeded with an all-black cast.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What about her husband? She moved to America for him. Do you think he played a role in her disappearance from the film world? Author Steve Ross says in the film that once large investment firms saw the potential for profits in cinema, the women were pushed out. \u201cAlice would have no chance. Wall street money comes in the front door, women are forced out the back door.\u201d<\/p>\n

GREEN<\/p>\n

He was not a good business person, but I think if she hadn\u2019t met Blach\u00e9, she would still have eventually been pushed out once people realized there was money in cinema. If she had gone to California earlier, maybe Solax would have been a brand that we still know today.<\/p>\n

And the films, they were lost. When you ship out a film to a theater, you don\u2019t get it back. Where does it go? Most of them were made out of nitrate. If these films had been recorded and documented properly, I think we would have a different landscape of what filmmaking has looked like for women in the history of cinema as a whole.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You chose Be Natural<\/em> as the title for the film, which was taken from a sign Guy-Blach\u00e9 hung in her studio at Solax. Encouraging actors to be natural was a very different approach to directing in a time when people were accustomed to posing for pictures.<\/p>\n

GREEN<\/p>\n

That is what attracted me to her in the first place. I couldn\u2019t believe how her films didn\u2019t fit the era whatsoever. Some did, I\u2019m sure, but many of them look completely modern. What can I tell you? They look like they\u2019re from the twenties or later.\u00a0Some of her actors weren\u2019t even actors at the time. Some came from theater, but others she just grabbed from the studio and gave them direction. With the actors from the theater, she didn\u2019t want the gestures.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Alice is quoted in the beginning of the film saying, \u201cIt was my fate, if you will.\u201d<\/p>\n

GREEN<\/p>\n

In her memoirs, she says that becoming a filmmaker was her destiny. With Alice, the biggest thing was ignoring the obstacles and focusing on the possibilities. I want this film to entertain, but I also want to change history for her. I want people to watch, to be inspired, and to find the possibilities in themselves and those around them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blach\u00e9 was an official selection of the Cannes, Telluride, Deauville American, BFI London, and New York Film Festivals. It\u00a0will be screening from December 7th to 13th at the Metrograph in New York City. The film is scheduled for a wide release in Spring 2019 by Zeitgeist Films in association with Kino Lorber.<\/em><\/p>\n

Toniann Fernandez is a writer based in Brooklyn. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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