Extraordinary Women: The Filmmaking Pioneer
Alice GuyBlaché (1873-1968)
Sunday Sept. 29, 2024, 12:30 pm, Revue Cinema
Tickets: By $16 suggested donation on Eventbrite or at the door. Watch the trailer.
More than six years ago, we looked at the story of Alice Guy-Blaché , the first woman director in film, with a screening of an NFB documentary. Since then, a more comprehensive film about her work and life has been released, this one narrated by actor and director Jodie Foster and with some big name support behind it, including Robert Redford and, surprisingly, Hugh Hefner, who was the project’s biggest donor. The documentary, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché is a biography; it also plays as a detective drama as filmmaker and writer Pamela Green tracks down descendants of both Guy-Blaché and her colleagues, uncovers documents, and locates examples of work that survives.
Green embarked on her years-long odyssey to make Be Natural after watching a documentary about early women filmmakers and being surprised that she had never heard of Guy-Blaché, who was such an important figure in the early days of cinema. Not only is she credited with being the first woman director; she also wrote and directed one of the first narrative moving pictures in 1896.
It all began for Guy-Blaché, when she landed a job as secretary in the 1890s at Gaumont, a French company that made camera equipment. That position put her in the middle of a revolution — the development of motion pictures. In 1895, she saw the Lumière brothers’ demonstration of their new film technology, and came up with the idea of telling stories with the new medium. Her first picture: The Fairy of the Cabbages or The Birth of Children, a whimsical bit of folklore about where children came from.
Over her working career, she wrote, produced or directed 1,000 films, including 150 with synchronized sound during the client era. Here work includes comedies, western and dramas, as well as films with ground-breaking subject matter such as child abuse, immigration, Planned parenthood and female empowerment. She also etched a place in history by making the earliest known surviv-ing narrative film with an all-Black cast films.
One of her notable productions was the 1906 big-budget The Life of Christ, with over 300 extras. After a move with her husband to the U.S. to operate Gaumont’s American division, she founded her own production facility. At the studio she built in Fort Lee, New Jersey, she had a large sign “Be natural,” her directive to actors working on her projects.
She wasn’t the only woman filmmaker pioneer. There were more women working at all levels in the movie business in the early years than at any other time. Check out this 2016 article in the Guardian and the Women Film Pioneers website.
Our Expert:
Prof. Charlie Keil
We’re thrilled to welcome Innis College Principal and early cinema expert Charlie Keil, who will take part in a post-screening discussion and Q&A. (Charlie is an engaging lecturer who consistently earns an “awesome” rating from his students!). A specialist in early cinema, he has concentrated on the period he has labelled ‘transitional,’ the years between 1907 and 1913 when significant changes occurred to industrial structure, production, distribution, and exhibition practices, and film form.
Beyond numerous essays, three of his books, Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style and Filmmaking, 1907-1913 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices, co-edited with Shelley Stamp (University of California Press, 2004), and American Cinema of the 1910s, co-edited with Ben Singer (Rutgers University Press, 2009), have focussed on this period. His other books include: Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood, co-edited with Daniel Goldmark (University of California Press, 2011), Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks, and Publics of Early Cinema, co-edited with Marta Braun, Rob King, Paul Moore, and Louis Pelletier (John Libbey / Indiana University Press, 2012), and Editing / Special Visual Effects, co-edited with Kristen Whissel (Rutgers University Press, 2016). Volumes in preparation include: A Companion to D.W. Griffith (Wiley-Blackwell); The Oxford Handbook of Early Cinema, co-edited with Rob King; and a study of the establishment of Hollywood, co-authored with Denise McKenna (University of California Press).
Beyond the above-listed books, Charlie has also published on documentary, cinema and theatre, authorship, stardom, and contemporary cinema. In collaboration with Marta Braun of Ryerson University, he has been engaged in a longstanding research project that entails the creation of an online database of films shot in Ontario during the silent era.
About the film Be Natural:
Released in 2018, Be Natural (103 min)was produced, directed and edited by Pamela Green, and narrated by Jodie Foster. Be Natural premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Cannes Classics category.