Silent movies - Madame's Cravings or Say, do you know Alice Guy-Blaché?

A few weeks ago, I shared a short with you and said I would be telling you more about the filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché sometime. Well, sometime is today.
First let me share another of her films, though.
This is "Madame Has Her Cravings" from 1906 in which a pregnant lady satisfies her different cravings by taking food, drink, and even a pipe from others while her husband pushing the pram with their first child gets the abuse for it.
In the end, she pushes him and he pushes her and she falls into a cabbage patch from which he then takes the newborn baby - which of course relates to the French legend that girls are born in a rose and boys in a cabbage.



It's a weird little film from our modern point of view (especially the drinking and smoking), but to be honest, I just picked something as a bridge to talk about Alice Guy-Blaché.
Strap yourself in, this is not going to be short.

Alice Guy's father Émile was a bookseller in Chile where his wife Marie's and his first four children were born.
Alice, however, was born in Paris, on July 1, 1873. Émile returned to Chile because of his business and Marie followed, but Alice stayed with her grandmother in Switzerland for a few years, was then taken to Chile and back to Switzerland at the age of 6 to attend a convent boarding school there.

After her parents had returned to Paris because the business went down due to different reasons, Émile died and eventually Alice had to find a job to support Marie and herself. She had trained to be a typist and stenographer and got an interview with the owner of Le Comptoir Générale de Photographie.
The owner wasn't there, but Alice got to see Louis Gaumont who acknowledged her recommendations, but thought she was too young for such an important job to which she replied that it would pass. She got the job.
Gaumont finally bought Le Comptoir together with three others (including Eiffel). He was one of the people in the race of the moving pictures, but the Lumière brothers were the winners. Along with Gaumont, his secretary Alice Guy was invited to their first screening out of courtesy.
As mentioned in my post about Méliès's "Trip to the Moon", the Lumières used the technology for documentaries.
Alice, however, thought it would be nice to tell stories, and Gaumont, albeit thinking that this was a girlish thing to do, allowed her to try it as long as her work as a secretary didn't suffer.

So Guy wrote, directed, and produced one of the first films with a narrative, the "Cabbage Fairy" about a fairy finding newborns in a, right, in a cabbage patch - and she didn't stop there, oh no.

She used all kinds of new techniques, such as close-ups for "Madame Has Her Cravings". Did you know that they already had sound film back then? While Edison recorded on set, Guy pre-recorded on wax record and then they synchronized the sound with the film, for musical shorts for example.
Alice became head of production at Gaumont, she supervised and directed films, not just as the first female director, but the first director to develop narrative filmmaking. She made comedies, movies about feminism - with reversed male and female roles, for example - and family, and she trained directors and writers.

Guy's film about the Life of Christ with 300 extras and early special effects went over budget because a crew member destroyed sets. This could have jeopardized her position if Eiffel hadn't spoken up for her.
So she could go on making successful movies.

In 1906, Alice met Herbert Blaché Bolton from the London branch of Gaumont.
Gaumont sent her to Germany to support chronophone customers. As she didn't know the country and also didn't speak German, Herbert went with her as translator. They got engaged, and when Gaumont sent Herbert to the USA to promote the chronophone, Alice went with him.
The promotion didn't go well and Gaumont came to Flushing, NY, to buy a studio which he wanted to use mostly for music shorts to be made by Blaché. Lois Weber was asked to appear in some of them. Guy, who had a child now and was no longer with the company officially, directed some of them and it is said that she later gave Weber the opportunity to write and direct under her supervision. Remember Lois Weber, the first American female director, from my post here?

Alice wasn't content with just being a mother, however, she still wanted to make films, so she rented part of the Flushing studio and founded the Solax Studios with her husband and a third partner. They made silent movies which were so successful that she had to hire assistant directors, not just comedies or Western movies, but also movies with more controversial topics, such as strikes or antisemitism.
On set, she put up big signs for her actresses and actors simply saying "Be Natural".
Later, they bought land in Fort Lee, NJ, and built a new studio there. New Jersey was the center of the US film industry at the time, not Hollywood.
Guy not only showed strong women in her films, she also wrote about women in film production.

Then came an economic depression and World War I began. Solax was forced to work for other companies. Movies were not an art anymore, they became business. 
On top of that, there was the "Edison Trust" of Edison, Eastman Kodak, and eight other companies who tried to prevent filmmakers using their cameras and film to shoot movies without being part of the trust. That meant either payinf licensing fees or become independent. Filmmakers moved to the West Coast to escape the trust and be able to make movies more cheaply.

The Blachés had to rent the Solax studios out to other companies. Then Herbert left the family and moved to Hollywood with his mistress. Solax was in debt already and then they lost one of their buildings due to a fire as well. Alice got influenza and Herbert had her and the children come to Los Angeles, but they lived separately and also just didn't work well together anymore.
When everything at Solax had to be auctioned off and the couple got divorced, Guy went back to France with the children. She never made a film again. In France she had been forgotten and no one in the industry wanted to hire her. Actually, women got pushed out in general.
Alice wrote to Gaumont asking for a job, but not only didn't she get one, when the company published their history, she wasn't even mentioned in it.
Just as Alice first supported her mother working as a secretary, now her daughter supported her working as one.
In a documentary mentioning Fort Lee studios, only Herbert was credited for Solax.

Guy started working for the Société Parisienne d'Edition.
Gaumont gave her an assignment on the company's beginnings in the film industry. Alice found that in the list of films he had sent her many of those that she directed were credited to one of the male directors. Gaumont said they would have to use her notes in a second edition, but that never happened before his death. An article about the French film industry also didn't mention her. 

Guy was constantly either being ignored by most film historians or her important films were credited to male directors, but others she didn't like credited to her.
She tried to find her films, but no one knew where they were and if they even existed anymore. So many silent films are lost today, destroyed or possibly hidden away in archives.
Then she wrote her memoirs, but no one was interested in publishing them at the time. They were published only after her death.
She also kept trying to find her films when she went back to the USA to live with her daughter, but sadly to no avail.
Alice Guy-Blaché died March 24, 1968.

There were and are people not wanting her to stay forgotten in an industry that is still male-dominated today, forgotten like so many other women achieving big things who got cut out of the picture.
They set out to find and preserve films of her, locate documents and information, and do research about her and her achievements. They made documentaries about her and talked about her.
Well, and now, if you actually made it all the way to the end, you know a little more about Alice Guy-Blaché as well. There would be so much more to tell, but I didn't want the post to get too long.
Maybe I made you curious now, though, I would like that very much.


Selected sources:

1. Alison McMahan: Alice Guy Blaché. On: Women Film Pioneers Project
2. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché. Documentary by Pamela B. Green. 2018. On the YouTube channel of TodoEsImagen
3. Alice Guy - L'inconnue de 7e art. Documentary for ARTE TV by Nathalie Masduraud and Valérie Urréa. On the YouTube channel of Otro Patrimonio (in French)
4. The Lost Garden: The Life and Cinema of Alice Guy-Blaché. 1995. By Marquise Lepage and Solange Collin. On the YouTube channel of Obscurity
5. Shari Kizirian: Woman with a Movie Camera: The Films of Alice Guy Blaché. Essay. On: San Francisco Silent Film Festival. A Day of Silents 2019