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Some wonderful films have come out in recent years by women. Their perspectives, their natural flair for storytelling and receptivity to emotions have all added an extra dimension . Since Otar Left [ Julie Bertucelli ] , Look at Me [ Agnes Jaoui ], Rachida [ Yasmina Bachir ], Whale Rider [ Niki Caro ] , Red Road [ Andrea Arnold ], Away from her [ Sarah Polly ] , Grabavica [ Jasmina Zbanic ].These and many others have been following in the tradition of women film makers since 1896 when the first narrative feature in the world was made by a woman, ALICE GUY. It took India till 1981 and an Aparna Sen to give us a taste of the feminine EYE.

To the question of why there are so few women in the upper echelons of power one has always heard the same answers. Biology, the Body Clock, The inevitable CHOICE one must make between marriage/motherhood and a career, Rivalry among women, Inability of women to perform certain tasks unless they perform it like men……become men, ultimately lose their femininity and what not.

Is it worthwhile? Is an oft repeated question that is directed towards all women who have tried to step out of their clearly set out boundaries created for their own good by the patriarchy that concerns itself with such deep issues.

Morality.Sexuality.Power. You take care of the first two and we will take over the other. Men have been trying hard for centuries to restrain the female power as much as possible in all manners possible, if needed using violence and coercion to assure that the male order is not threatened.

How else would you otherwise explain organized religion with male godhoods stemming out from Goddess Worship, The Norse, Celtic, Graeco-Roman, Egyptian, Mesopotamian myths all have a great tradition of Goddesses, but how many of us have heard of Freyja, Morrigan, Bast, Ishtar, Persephone, Demeter? And right in Mecca , the mecca of male-ness. Uzza, Al-Manat, Al-Lat.
Like so many other feminine and matriarchal cultures they too have disappeared orhave taken refuge in Time , to resurrect at a more opportune moment. Sage move.

For now we don’t worship them, we gaze at them, we objectify them and cut them in dimensions of our fancy and fit them in garments of our making. And then of course we are finally ready to worship Her, as a Goddess. Marilyn Monroe to Bipasha Basu we will give allow her media bytes and photo ops only if she has the specifications to match, fulfills her primary obligation of providing fulfillment to male sexual fantasies. Forget what she thinks, feels or God Forbid she has something interesting to say. SAY??

How else would you explain the dearth of women film makers in India? Iran, a Muslim country with women in chadors and fighting a repressive regime has more! What a terrible shame. But do we want to listen to what women want ? What they want to say and what they want to show? Unless of course it is what lies beneath their cholis and between their legs. What about the women who have ALREADY made films and are making more?

Yes , what about them? You might remember a Hema Malini [ but she is the DREAM GIRL remember, she does not count ] or a Suhasini or Revathy [ both competent actresses of their time ] but have you heard of Santwana Bordoloi ? or Kavita Lankesh or Vijaya Nirmala [ who was also an actress ] unless you are an Ahomiya, Kannadiga or Telugu chances are that you are looking at these names for the first time. Do we want to know what they are doing now?
It is not that there were no women who were great Poets or Playwrights in the past, it is not that they were no Vedic seers or Vikings who were women, it is only that history has chosen to disregard them or confined half of humanity to a space which is safe for the other half.

This is not a feministic article in the least but a preparation of what is to come. Starting with women directors who were ignored by history to contemporary women directors we will explore their films and motivation. We will try to understand this myth of film making as being a tough choice as a career for women. As a choice for women who would want both a home and a career.

At the very outset, do we even realize that the DIRECTOR OF THE WORLD’S FIRST NARRATIVE FEATURE is a lady?
Alice Guy [ some might say the name says it all ! ] made the first ever narrative in 1896 , she made films in all genres including science fiction , some 300 films, setting up SOLAX, a film studio in New Jersey after moving in from France [ where she was fortunate to come in contact with Lumiere and his camera ], from her first film to 1919 before the STUDIOS and BIGGIES took over she reigned queen , benign and motherly. Mother of two children and active promoter of other female talent, she was soon sidelined and soon enough ignored and discarded to an extent that she had to fight to restore her right over credits, on many of her films.

ALICE GUY BLACHÉ
(1875 - 1968)
History is lies agreed upon by the victors
CONTACT US AT:
research@reelwomen.com

Never has an axiom proved truer than in the case of the motion picture pioneer, Alice Guy Blaché. The first woman film director in history as well as the first director, male or female, to bring a narrative film to the screen.
Blaché directed, produced and/or supervised nearly 300 films in her lifetime. She then spent the rest of her life attempting to prove to others that she had done so.
Who’s Who in the Motion Picture World of 1915 credits her with starting the production of multiple reels in this country. Charles Ford in his article, “The First Female Producer” tells us that she tackled every genre and manner of film: fairytales and fantasies, romances and comedies, religious parables, myths, trick films, and paintings that came alive. She even produced, as Francis Lacassin points out in “Sight and Sound”, a science fiction film entitled, In the Year 2000 in which women rule the world.

As early as 1906, says Lacassin, Blaché filmed one of the first movies ever to be shot in color (La Fee Printemps). And throughout 1906 - 1907 she was busy directing about 100 sound movies (running a minute or two in length), on an early device called the ‘Chronophone’, which combined sound recorded on a wax cylinder with the filmed image. Yet, according to traditional sources of film “history”, Blaché either doesn’t exist,6 or when she is mentioned, historians belittle the magnitude and the effect of her contribution. For instance, In The Dictionary of Film Makers, published as late as 1972, author Georges Sadoul lists Blache this way:
Guy Blaché, Alice - …originally Leon Gaumont’s secretary when he was still only making film equipment. She began making short films intended for use as demonstrations to clients. She made her first film, “La Fee Aux Choux” in 1896, some months before Melies, thus becoming the first woman director in the world.

What is significant about this is that the listing of Melies in the same book describes him as the first director of story films, the father of narrative cinema. Not the first man director, but the first director. Although Blaché’s La Fee Aux Choux was produced as a vehicle to help sell the motion picture projector, and not specifically intended for entertainment purposes as Melies’ products were, it was most certainly a “story” film. Running about a minute, it was base on old French fable about a fairy who makes children in a cabbage patch. Historian Sadoul, however, chose to invent the subcategory, “woman director” presumably in order to reserve the title of “first director” for a man.

Thankfully, omissions do not take away from facts. Born in Paris, the remarkable Blache was the youngest daughter of a bookseller who, as Charles Ford says, “imbued her with a love of literature and the arts.” An independent spirit from the word go, Blache took it upon herself to learn shorthand-typing when her father died so she could earn a living…a still rare accomplishment for women of pre-turn of the century France. In 1885, she took a job as a secretary for the Gaumont organization when Gaumont was still only making still photography equipment. In 1895, Louis Lumiere paid him a visit to show him a new contraption that Lumiere had just invented: a camera that made still photographs appear as a series of moving images. Charles Ford tells us that Blaché was fascinated with what she saw. Some time after, Gaumont, an inventor in his own right, made his own version of Lumiere’s 60mm camera. Although he and his staff took pictures with the contraption, he couldn’t figure out any practical use for it. Blache on the other hand, realized almost immediately that in order to sell the gadget, it would have to intrique, mystify and entertain its potential buyer. Blaché herself said

…I thought I could do better…Gathering up my courage, I timidly proposed to Gaumont that I would write one or two short plays and make them for the amusement of my friends. If the developments which evolved from this proposal could have been foreseen, then I probably never never would have obtained his agreement. My youth, my lack of experience, my sex all conspired against me.

Gaumont, who never took the invention seriously, was taken aback — “What! What! All right, if you want to,” he is credited to have said, “It’s a child’s toy anyhow.”

He would let her have her fun on the condition that her secretarial duties did not suffer. And thus, pioneering her-story was made. La Fee Aux Choux was shown that same year (1896) at the International Exhibition in Paris. Blache’s experiment was so successful in selling Gaumont’s equipment, that she was completely relinquished from her secretarial tasks. From then on, she was in charge of Gaumont’s newly formed production entity. Richard Koszarski informs us that she established Gaumont’s filmmaking arm, produced nearly all the films made by them through 1906 (specializing in the talking Chronophone films,) and trained such future luminaries of the French cinema as Feuillade and Jasset.

Her early sound films, as Charles Ford explains, were ambitious undertakings - Scenes from operas (including the Paris Opera,) Fra Diavolo, Carmen, and Mignon. Still others utilized popular singers of the day. Nor did she lose interest in “tougher” subjects, says Lacassin, shooting a series of “military scenes”, most of which were among the world’s first cowboy pictures. Many of her films of this period utilized cinematic tricks generally attributed to Melies. In Pierrot’s Christman, for instance, “she used masking and double exposure, and in A House Demolished and Rebuilt she ran film backward.

Blache’s technical advisor, Frederic Dillaye, helped her refine the tricks. “… In experience acquired day by day,” says Blache, “by mistake, by chance, I discovered small tricks such as film turned inside out allows a house to collapse and be reconstructed again like magic. A person can tumble from a roof and go back up again instantly…” As Richard Henshaw asserts,
The problems she faced were not unlike those of George Melies, whose chronology in the years before 1900 were roughly parallel to Guy’s…what was there in the realm of possibilities that could express the idiosyncracies of a new art to a pre-conditioned public?
In France, the “contrived scenes” of Guy, Melies and Ferdinand Zecca of Pathe were the premiere efforts in the establishment of a narrative cinema. Guy’s importance in this regard should henceforth be understood and synthesized into the annals of film history, and Melies’ ultimate position as the more inventive of the two should not obscure Guy’s prominence as an instigator of fictional film.

While Guy was filmming bullfights in Nimes, she met and soon after (1907) married an English cameraman in charge of Gaumont’s London office, Herbert Blache. For nearly three years she abandoned her career for domesticity.

The Blaché’s moved to America. For a brief stint, they began in Cleveland, then moved to New York, where Alice gave birth to a daughter. In 1910, while her husband was running Gaumont’s branch office, Alice was quickly growing bored with domestic life and decided to go back to directing. “Who’s Who in Directing” in 1912 claims that Blaché “with her own money,” and quite on her own accord, organized “The Solax Company”. Lacassin says,
October 1910 - June 1914, under the trademark of a blazing sun, the Solax company produced some 325 films of assorted lengths and types. At least 35 (possibly as many as 50) of them were directed by the company’s lady president

Blache’s mission was to cater films specific to American tastes and acted in by American artists. Under her good business-ship, says Gerald Peary, “the history of Solax was, from its inception, an almost unbroken line of success.”

She was so successful in fact, that soon she was able to move to Fort Lee, N.J. and construct, as Peary asserts, probably the best equipped moving picture plant in the world. At a cost of an unheard of $100,000, the new Solax contained carpentry shops, prop rooms, hotel-like dressing rooms, and area set aside for men…five stage sets, laboratories, darkrooms and projection rooms.

In the early part of her career, Blaché was modest and shy of publicity. She just wanted to do her work in the best way she could. She ran Solax, says Peary, “with the kind of total authority that leads to theorizing about ‘the studio head as auteur’” But motion picture trade papers of the day (1912) never failed to note, “the happy atmosphere of the Solax studio, banked together, like the happy family which they are…”

Her daughter, Simone Blaché in Women Who Make Movie, would later disagree, “In many respects she was a nineteeth-century person. She believed in the family structure. And yet, she had strong feminist views. She was enthused by everything she saw and heard that was feminist in any way.”

If Blaché felt herself to be feminist, she certainly didn’t let anyone know. Perhaps she thought it would be more diplomatic not to ruffle anyone’s feathers with her political views. As Gerald Peary points out, her public views on the “nature of woman” leaned much closer to the Victorian male’s.

Not only is a woman as well fitted to stage photodrama as a man, but in many ways she has a distinct advantage over him because of her very nature and because much of the knowledge called for in the telling of the story and the creation of the stage setting is absolutely within the province as a member of the gentler sex. She is an authority on the emotions. For centuries she had given them full play while man has carefully trained himself to control them. She has developed her finer feelings for generations, … and she is naturally religious. In matters of the heart her superiority is acknowledged, her deep insight and sensitiveness in the affairs of cupid … it seems to me that a woman is especially well qualified to obtain the very best results, for she is dealing with subjects that are almost second nature to her…
After bowing her head in this appropriate (for the day,) “geesha girl” gesture, by acknowledging as a man might, woman’s “proper place”, she comes in for a more emphatic finish — the confidence and true conviction of her heart:

There is nothing connected with the staging of a motion picture that a woman cannot do as easily as a man, and there is no reason why she cannot completely master every technicality of the art.

More important than what a person says is what she does. Gerald Peary explains her public non-political stance by theorizing that as a woman she felt,
…she should stay away from editorializing about something so close to her situation- rather than taking the opposite and more tenable view that she should make personal movies on women’s rights precisely because the question was so relevant to her.
He goes on to point out,

Actually, Alice Blaché is slightly misrepresented if she is seen as totally avoiding women’s issues, for there are a few Solax movies which…do offer some rather strange persectives to their story content. For instance, these movies…of 1912:
THE CALL OF THE ROSE. Grace Moore, a professional opera singer, marries a young miner, who takes her West and sets her up in a little college. For a time, Grace is happy watching her devoted husband dig for gold. But soon, “the emptiness of her inactive existence” leads her to leave her husband and go East to resume her career… And yet, she still is not completely happy. Her husband comes East and they are reunited. (Does Grace keep her career? The plot outline doesn’t say)

WINSOME BUT WISE. An “impecunious” young lady “full of energy and pluck” goes West. She gets an idea that she can catch a notorious bandit who has eluded posse after posse. The cowboys laugh. The young lady sets out by herself, captures the bandit through trickery when she gets him to try on handcuffs, then takes him in and gets the reward.
THE TWO LITTLE RANGERS. “Wild Bill” Grey, wifebeater and villain, is chased to a shack by two young sisters, Mary and Gladys. “The girls are determined to get him and, after seeing their volley of bullets have no effect, discharge a firebrand from a bow. The firebrand sets the shack on fire and Grey perishes in his own tomb.

Despite the high level of suffrage activism of the day, publicity mongers were not beyond ignorant sexist reductions. Louis Reeves Harrison of a June 1912 “Moving Picture World” filters his vision through a Victorian chivalric (i.e. ‘chauvanistic’) lens,
Madame Blaché is, “never ruffled, never agitated, never annoyed by the obtrusive effects of minor characters to thrust themselves into prominence. With a few simple directions, uttered without apparent emotion, she handles the interweaving movements like a military leader might the manoeuvres of an army.

The subtleties of his language here are priceless. The allusions to “lack of emotion” and to “militaristic maneuvers” are there as firm proof for the reader that Blache is entitled to be a director because she can do it like a man.

In 1914, so disturbed and horrified was she after a visit to the prison, Sing Sing, she spoke out for prison reform in her film, The Lure, an attack of the white slavery racket. Although passed by the National Board of Censorship without a single change, The New York Times labeled her movie, “malodorous” and lumped it with other white slavery sexploitation films of the same era.
After Solax, Blaché continued her career successfully, forming two subsequent companies with her husband, Herbert. However, by 1919, it was becoming nearly impossible for any independent to compete with the onslaught of the growing monolyths of Hollywood - the studio “Majors”. She began to hire out her talents to the larger companies, but it was clear that her career as an independent voice in the industry was all but finished.

A time of great personal strife ensued. Her company fell into decline, and so did her marriage. Demoralized and defeated, she returned to France in 1922 with her two children, (a son, Reginald, was born in 1911, one year after she began Solax,) hoping to pick up the pieces of her career in her homeland. But without prints of her films, and by this time, a middle-aged woman, no one would employ her. “Mother was really cherished in the United States,” said her daughter, Simone, “The situation in France was quite the reverse.”

In 1927, reports Louise Heck-Rabi, she returned to the States to search for her films. But a visit to the Library of Congress, as well as several film depositories uncovered nothing at all.
Blaché began supporting herself by producing conferences at Universities on “feminine psychology and filmmaking”. She wholeheartedly believed in both marriage and in a working life for women. And as we have seen, the last group of people to whom she had to sell herself were the men in the business. So why did it become necessary for her to spend years of unrelenting energy to correct historian’s records to prove what in fact she had done? Perhaps as early as the early 20’s she knew it would be the only way, as Heck-Rabi has said, “to assure herself of the place she had earned in the history of film.”

The question of “firsts” in film is always a tricky affair at best. So much of it is culled from subjective memory. Still more has been unearthed from the unreliable hype of the Hollywood promotional machine. And the remaining bits were omitted by male biased vision, or simply gotten wrong.

Heck-Rabi goes on,
…many of her films were cited as works by others. No one realized and tried to correct published errors more assiduously than Mme. Blache herself. She anticipated that directing and producing credits for her films would be falsely assigned to her co-workers. She knew that her name, unintentionally or purposefully, would be omitted, or ignored or demoted in the histories of French and American film.

Georges Sadoul wrongly credited her for directing Les mefaits d’une tete de veau (”The misdeeds of a Calf’s Head”). In an interview, she said that she was honored, but this was one of the few Gaumont pictures that she did not direct.36 She did, however, direct an imporant film of that period, Passion (cf La Vie du Christ - 1906), a picture that Sadoul credited to Victorin Jasset, her assistant on the film. 37 Says Blache, “M. Sadoul…was poorly informed and in all good faith no doubt…attributed my first films to those who were at the Gaumont studios as figureheads, ignoring my name…” 38

Blaché approached Sadoul with documents “by which I tried to persuade him that the films in question were my work. He promised to correct this in his next edition, which in all honesty he did so, but his list (of her films) once again, contained errors.” 39

At the age of 78, Blaché was finally honored in France as the first woman filmmmaker in the world, at the Cinematheque Francais, and made a knight of the French Legion of Honor.
But in Mahwah, New Jersey, the State in which she changed the course of film history and made her most entrepreneurial triumphs, she died anonymous. Not one newspaper carried her obituary. She was 95 years old.
@2002 Ally Acker

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