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

Silent movies - Suspense

Comedy, science fiction, horror, romance, crime, adventure, fairy tale, slapstick, animation, is there something that is still missing in my silent movie journey? There is indeed - documentary.

An obvious choice would have been the first film to be called a documentary (which is debatable as a lot of it was staged due to the realities of film making in 1922 and also represented the Inuit life as it had been, not as it was at the time of filming) - "Nanook of the North" - but I'll be honest, I wasn't ready to deal with hunt scenes and the life of polar dogs at the time.
Instead I called up a list of silent documentaries and picked "The Epic of Everest" without knowing what exactly it was about although it was not difficult to guess that it would involve mountaineering, a topic I'm not really interested in.
Of course I'm fascinated by the majesty of the Himalaya and Mount Everest - known as Sagarmatha in Nepal and Qomolangma in Tibet - how could you not be, but why someone would want to climb it, is beyond me and my strictly non-adventurous mind.
I had of course forgotten about donkeys and yaks carrying heavily loads, and a half hour into the film they had lost me when they showed a baby donkey born on the trail and said how many miles this poor baby allegedly had to walk. It hadn't signed up for this!

What to do now?
I went back to the list, but nothing sounded as if I was up for watching it.
Understandably, that was still the time of the great explorers and exploring something always involved animals, livestock or wild ones and therefore inevitably scenes I didn't want to see. Even those filmmakers who wanted to point out what humans did to wildlife used that same wildlife to stage situations for their documentaries - for example Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack of "King Kong" fame.
I know those were different times and therefore those films are interesting in more than one regard, not just for their content, but also why or how that content was collected, but my skin is not thick enough for it these days.

I will keep searching and have one movie on my list, but for this post I needed something short and quick now.
What I found was "Suspense" by Lois Weber from 1913 which is in the public domain and which you can watch here.

As this is a silent short film of 10 minutes, the plot is told rather quickly (spoilers as usual!).
At a remote house, a maid quits letting her employer, a mother with a small baby, only know by note. She leaves the key under the mat. When the mother finds the note, she locks doors and windows.
A tramp has seen the maid leaving, goes to check out the house and finds the key. When the woman notices him, she calls her husband who has to work late, but the tramp cuts the line.

The husband hurries to help her by taking the first car parked in the street and racing off followed by the owner and police.

While the woman has locked herself in the bedroom with her baby and put a dresser in front of the door, the tramp looks around the house, and the man gets held up when he hits a man standing in the middle of the road and helps him up again.
The tramp hears sounds from above, and armed with a knife, he breaks into the bedroom. Just then the cars arrive at the house. Shots aimed at the husband panic the tramp, he runs downstairs where he gets overpowered by the husband and police.
The man runs upstairs to find his wife and baby unharmed. He explains everything and is of course forgiven.

I have to admit that I had never heard of Lois Weber before, another example of not just an early maker of silent films, but a woman whose achievements had been forgotten.

Public domain

Actually, Weber was a pioneer in early film, the "first American woman to direct a feature film" and the "leading female director-screenwriter in early Hollywood", not to mention that she also acted, for example as the mother in "Suspense". Eventually, she even had her own studio.

This isn't supposed to be a post about Lois Weber (and her husband Phillips Smalley with whom she mostly worked until their divorce), though, especially as I haven't seen any of her other movies yet that have survived. She had a large output, but a lot is lost like so many silent films.
There are four links at the bottom if you would like to know more about her, and who knows, maybe she'll be turning up in another post of mine eventually.

To the movie now.
The title doesn't promise too much.
Like other films, "Suspense" was likely inspired by a French Grand Guignol play from 1902 - "Au Téléphone" by André de Lorde and Charles Foley - which didn't have a happy ending, though. The husband has to listen to his family getting murdered without being able to help.

Weber used different techniques to build up suspense, for example the split screen showing the three narratives - the husband at the office, the wife and baby at home, and the tramp breaking in.
In the car chase, there is the mirrored image of the pursuers coming closer.
You have interesting angles like when the wife looks out of the window and sees the tramp outside.

There is a lot more to say about the technical side of the film of course, but I leave that to the experts. Instead I want to tell you what I thought when I watched it a second time as there is rather a lot to see for a short of 10 minutes and you know me and my weird brain. I always have questions.

- The maid who contemplates announcing her leaving, but decides against it. Does she think she can't pull it through when she's looking the mother in the eye?
Without seeing her, the tramp might not even have got the idea to take a look at the house, and she unknowingly made it easier for him by putting the key under the mat. What did she do that for, anyway? Why didn't she just leave it on the table with the note?
And why does the mother not go and get the key from under the mat when she locks all the doors?

- The tramp eating the sandwiches, rummaging around a bit, not very convincingly, and then going for the woman. I've heard of people eating or drinking at crime scenes, but usually after the deed is done.
Why the sudden urge for making a "simple" break-in even worse?

- The husband hitting the man in the road. I find it rather nice that he doesn't just drive off, but gets out, pats him down, asks him if he's okay, but then he stops to look out for his pursuers twice (!) before getting back in the car and driving on. Oh, my wife is in danger, la-di-da ....

Does that make it sound as if I didn't like the movie? Not at all. Those are just things I started thinking about after watching it a second time.
Of course all of those things had to be just like this to increase the feeling of suspense which worked just perfectly.

From what I read, Weber's other movies often revolved around social issues, so "Suspense" seems to be an exception, and of course a lot of her work is lost, but I'm definitely putting her on my watch list for more.


Sources:

About "Suspense"
1. Fritzi Kramer: Suspense (1913) A Silent Film Review. On: Movies Silently, April 24, 2016
2. Short of the Month: Suspense (dir. Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley, 1913). On: Nitrateglow, February 11, 2022
3. "At the telephone" - English translation of "Au téléphone" by André de Lorde. In: "One-act plays for stage and study, second series, 1925, edited by Walter Prichard Eaton"

About Lois Weber:
1. Angelica Aboulhosn: Lois Weber: An Early Hollywood Filmmaker with Her Own Studio. In: Humanities, vol. 44(2023), issue 4
2. Shelley Stamp: Lois Weber. On: Women Film Pioneers Project. October 15, 2019
3. Lea Stans: "The Muse Of The Reel" - The Pioneering Work of Director Lois Weber. On: Silent-ology, January 25, 2018
4. Travis Lee Ratcliff: A History of Silence: The Cinema of Lois Weber. On his YouTube channel