Biography: life and films
In America, Alice Guy created her own highly successful film studio and soon became a wealthy celebrity. It is ironic, given that she is such a shining example of the film auteur, that she should have helped to instigate the star system that would marginalise auteurs. Her career ended as suddenly as it had begun, through a series of personal and professional misfortunes that ruined her. Within a decade after she had made her last film in 1920 Guy was forgotten. Until the 1960s, she was completely overlooked by film historians, her name invariably omitted from histories of cinema and film guides. It is only within the last few decades, many years after her death, that Alice Guy's immense contribution to cinema has come to be recognised, but even now she is too often forgotten. Things might have been different if she had been a man.
Alice Ida Antoinette Guy was born in Mandé, in the eastern suburbs of Paris on 1st July 1873. Her parents, Emile and Marie Guy, were living in Chile at the time, but they undertook the long journey to France so that their fifth child, Alice, could be born there. Alice was placed in the care of her grandparents, who lived in Carouge, Switzerland, whilst her parents went back home to Chile, where Emile ran a successful publishing company and a chain of book shops. At the age of four, Alice was old enough to rejoin her family in Chile, but she returned to France two years later to attend a convent School near the Swiss border. A few years later, Emile Guy's business went bust and, not long after his eldest son died at the age of 17 from a heart condition, he also died. With her other sisters now married, it fell to Alice to support herself and her ageing mother, so she trained to become a shorthand typist and stenographer.
Alice Guy was 21 when she was recommended for the position of secretary at the Comptoir général de la photographie. Owned by the Richard brothers, this was a company that manufactured photographic and optical equipment and was located at 57, rue Saint-Roch in Paris. Guy was interviewed by a dynamic 31-year old employee, Léon Gaumont, who told her she was too young for such a responsible position. 'I'll get over that,' Alice replied, and was promptly given the job, with a salary of 150 francs per month. When the company became insolvent, Gaumont bought it in July 1895 and gave it his name, founding what was soon to become one of the world's leading motion picture companies.
Through her work for Léon Gaumont, Alice Guy came into contact with several important inventors through whom she would acquire a fascination for the moving image. First there was Georges Demenÿ and his phonoscope, a system for projecting a series of images (taken with a special camera) in quick succession to create the illusion of continuous motion. Gaumont was so impressed with this device that he immediately signed a contract with Demenÿ so that he could go ahead and manufacture it. Even before Demenÿ's phonoscope had gone into production it was obsolete, because by now the Lumière brothers had unveiled to the world their cinématographe, a device that could both record and project moving pictures.
It was in the summer of 1895 that Léon Gaumont and Alice Guy were invited by the Lumières to a demonstration of their cinématographe. Both were impressed by what they saw and it took them no time to realise the enormous commercial opportunities. Guy greatly admired the Lumières' invention but was less taken with what they did with it. If all they did was to make moving pictures of people clocking off from work there clearly wouldn't be much of a future for the cinématographe. A devotee of literature, Guy saw at once the artistic and creative possibilities of the new medium and asked her employer if he would allow her to make a few moving pictures of her own, using her friends as actors. Gaumont agreed, on condition that this did not interfere with her day job.
Having gained some theoretical knowledge by attending lessons given by the avant-garde photographer Frederic Dellaye, Alice Guy started to make films, unsupervised and self-taught, as early as 1896. Making up stories was something she enjoyed doing and was good at - this gave her a creative edge over the Lumières, who lacked the imagination to make their creation anything more than a curiosity piece. Guy's first film was La Fée aux choux (1896), a cute fable about women who grow babies in a cabbage patch. Running to around a minute in length, this has a strong claim to be the first film with a scripted narrative, preceding Georges Méliès's first film by just a few months. So fond of this film was Guy that she remade it as Sage-femme de première class six years later (with the result that the two films often get confused). La Fée aux choux was such a success - it sold over eighty copies - that Léon Gaumont immediately appointed Guy the head of production of a new section of his company, one that was devoted to making moving pictures. It was a remarkable thing for Gaumont to do, given that, at the time, women hardly ever occupied managerial positions and wouldn't even get the vote in France for another fifty years.
Alice Guy was not only the first woman to write and direct films, she was also the first female producer. This made her cinema's first auteur. Over the next decade, from 1896 to 1907, she produced somewhere in the region of seven hundred films for Gaumont - all shorts, varying in length from under a minute to just over half an hour. The majority of these have sadly been lost but the few hundred or so that survive bear witness not only to Guy's imagination and gift for storytelling, but also her technical competence and flair for innovation. Like her contemporary Georges Méliès, she experimented with camera effects and colour tinting and began laying the foundation for what was rapidly becoming the world's most exciting new art form and a popular medium of mass entertainment. Guy could not have done this on her own. It was the serendipitous union of Léon Gaumont's commercial nous and Alice Guy's creativity that led to the birth of the film industry.
Of the early film pioneers, Alice Guy was the one who was most active in bringing sound to her films. In 1902, Gaumont had patented a system that could synchronise the cinématographe (image projector) with a disc phonograph (sound projector), thereby bringing moving images and sound together. With this device, Guy was able to record for posterity performances of many famous singers of her time - she made about a hundred of these musical shorts, the forerunner of today's music video. By 1905, Guy was so busy (she not only wrote and directed her films, she also had to oversee the set and costume design) that she needed help writing new scripts. This led her to hire an aspiring young screenwriter named Louis Feuillade. Realising her new recruit's potential, Guy made him her apprentice and they were soon making films together. Feuillade then went on to make his own films for Gaumont, before taking over Guy's position as the company's artistic director after she had moved to the United States in 1907.
As you might expect, given that she was learning things as she went along, Guy's early films were fairly simple. Many merely depicted an exotic dancer performing her act - Danse serpentine (1897), Danse des saisons (1900), La Danse du ventre (1900) - or were variants on familiar stage routines, such as the vanishing lady act in Scène d'escamotage (1898). Some of Guy's most entertaining films involved the use of remarkably well trained animals - Miss Dundee et ses chiens savants (1902) and Clown, chien et ballon (1905) both involve dogs performing the wackiest of stunts for hilarious effect.
Guy soon became adept in using the substitution trick (also beloved by Georges Méliès), where the camera was stropped, something added or taken away from the set, and the camera restarted, creating the illusion that something had appeared or disappeared as if my magic. One of her most inspired uses of this effect is Comment monsieur prend son bain (1903), which serves up the never-ending striptease gag - a man is undressing for his bath, but whenever he removes one layer of clothing another layer always appears beneath. The same trick is used to great effect in Faust et Méphistophélès (1903), Guy's most Méliès-like film. Avenue de l'opéra (1900) employs another basic piece of film trickery - the entire film, depicting horses, pedestrians and automobiles moving down a busy thoroughfare, runs backward for comic effect.
Madame a des envies (1906) is worth noting for its early use of the close-up. Interestingly, the close-ups (depicting a woman indulging herself) appear to have been filmed in the studio and then inserted into the main narrative, which was filmed entirely on location. Guy used exterior locations to great effect in several of her films, notably Surprise d'une maison au petit jour (1898), which offers an authentic reconstruction of a page from history, the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. Some of her exterior-filmed shorts have an almost impressionistic feel to them. Her sunny comedy La Hiérarchie dans l'amour (1906), in which a young woman works her way up the ranks as she is courted by various military men, might almost have been filmed by Jean Renoir.
Some of Alice Guy's comedies are irresistibly funny and have more than a touch of Chaplin-like madness about them. Le Frotteur (1907) shows the disaster that can result when you allow a stranger to clean your floors, and La Course à la saucisse (1907) depicts a mad chase after a dog that has stolen a string of sausages - it is like a Benny Hill sketch, but much funnier. Le Billet de banque (1907) is pure Chaplin - it even features a tramp constantly getting into trouble. From time to time, Guy took her inspiration for literary sources - Esmeralda (1905) is clearly taken from Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
In 1906, Guy made her most ambitious film for Gaumont, La Naissance, la vie et la mort du Christ. This big budget production ran to 35 minutes in length (an epic for its time) and comprises 25 scenes and a cast of 300. The film impresses not only with its scale and artful design but also its technical sophistication. Guy uses the depth of field to create some spectacular deep compositions, with activity occupying all parts of the frame, not just the foreground. The lighting is also pretty advanced for its time, and with its stylishly designed interiors and naturalistic exteriors, the film can hardly fail to impress with its meticulous artistry. The phenomenal success of this film resulted in numerous inferior imitations being knocked out by rival studios.
Alice Guy's success at Gaumont was not well-received by everyone in the company, and some resented her merely because she was a woman doing what they believed was a man's job. She was on bad terms with her workshop manager, who maliciously destroyed the sets on one of her films. There was even an attempt to discredit her and have her dismissed, but this failed. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Alice Guy is how she, a young woman in her twenties, was able to create and manage such an efficient production team, given that she was living in such a strongly male-oriented and chauvinistic society.
In 1906, Léon Gaumont sent Alice Guy to Germany to sell his Chronophone. As Guy couldn't speak a word of German, she was provided with a translator - an Englishman named Herbert Blaché, who was at the time working for Gaumont as a camera operator. It was during their stay in Berlin that Guy, now 33, fell in love for the first time. She and Blaché married in March of the following year and spent their honeymoon on a ship bound for the United States, once again on a mission to promote Gaumont's Chronophone.
The anglophone Blaché was well-suited to become Gaumont's production manager in the United States and, with her husband now the breadwinner, Guy could take time out to start raising a family in New York. Her daughter Simone was born in 1908. Two years later, keen to get back to filmmaking, Guy founded her own production company, Solax, even though she was pregnant at the time with her second child, Reginald. Solax was first based in Flushing, Queens, not far from the Blachés' home in New York, but became so successful that in 1912 it relocated to larger premises in Fort Lee, New Jersey, which was the hub of the film industry in America at the time. Whilst running Solax, Guy made around fifty films - or 'photo-dramas' as they were called - and oversaw the production of around 300 others.
Guy's American films comprise a mix of popular genres - melodramas (Falling Leaves (1912)), westerns (Greater Love Hath No Man (1911)) and civil war films (For the Love of the Flag (1912)). She was particularly fond of love stories with a happy ending. One of the most amusing films Guy made for Solax is Making an American Citizen (1912), and you can't help but wonder to what extent this film is a reflection of her own turbulent marriage. It depicts a rough-looking immigrant who is repeatedly taken to task by a well-meaning American every time he abuses his wife. Eventually, the immigrant has the savagery beaten out of him, until he is finally transformed into the model American citizen and becomes the perfect husband. If this is what Guy was secretly hoping America might do for her own hubby she would soon be disappointed.
Despite her success, Alice Guy never became complacent and continued to play a major part in developing the language of modern cinema. Her stories became more sophisticated, she used natural locations imaginatively and peppered her films with increasingly spectacular stunts, knowing that this was what audiences craved. By employing a repertory of actors who could appear again and again in her films she helped to bring about the star system that would revolutionise cinema. Indeed, some of her frequent players - such as Olga Petrova (The Tigress (1914), The Vampire (1915)) - became major stars as a result of appearing in her films.
To encourage her actors to give more authentic performances, Guy put up signs all around her studio with the words 'Be Natural'. Audiences wanted longer films, and this is what Guy gave them. One-reel shorts became a thing of the past; two, three and even four reelers became the norm, paving the way for the ninety-minute feature that is the standard we have today. Solax's success made the Blachés rich and famous. In 1912, Alice Guy became the only woman in the United States to earn in excess of 25,000 dollars in one year. Her films were loved by the public, and praised to the skies by the critics. The Blachés were on top of the world. And then it all started to go wrong.
Alice Guy's first fatal mistake was to allow her husband to take over as the president of Solax in 1913. A few months later he left to start up his own company, Blaché Features which would soon absorb Solax. It was Blaché's bad management and poor negotiating skills that drove Solax to bankruptcy within a few years. The Blachés' downfall was exacerbated by the massive changes that were taking place in the American film industry at the time of the First World War. Severe restrictions in energy usage drove many film studios to relocate to sunny California, and in no time Hollywood had become the new hub of American filmmaking. It was a time of massive consolidation, with the bigger conglomerates buying up all of the the small independent studios. The Blachés were made very lucrative offers, but Guy refused to sell up - that was her second catastrophic error.
In 1918, Herbert Blaché ran off to Hollywood with an actress, leaving behind his wife and their two children. Guy followed her husband to Los Angeles and made an attempt to save their marriage. She even worked for him on two films. But it was hopeless - Guy's marriage ended just as her career was grinding to a halt. The Blachés' Fort Lee studios had to be auctioned off to pay back taxes and Guy almost died from Spanish flu whilst working on her final film, Tarnished Reputations (1920). Once her divorce had come through in 1922, Alice Guy headed back to France with her two children, having gone from riches to rags for the second time in her life. Luckily, she had a sister she could stay with in Nice whilst she looked for work. But no one wanted to employ her, not even Gaumont.
Alice Guy was 49 and no one seemed to know her or have any awareness of her past achievements. She soon gave up trying and instead started writing magazine articles and children's stories under various male pen names, such as Antoine Guy. She also wrote some screenplays, but she couldn't find a producer willing to consider these. When Simone Blaché landed a post at the American Embassy she was able to support her mother. Alice Guy accompanied her daughter as she was posted around Europe, in Belgium, Switzerland and France. Meanwhile, she set about writing her memoirs and tracking down her missing films. It was a search she was still actively engaged on when she was in her 80s, but she only succeeded in finding a few of her films. Most of them seemed to have disappeared for good.
In later years, what most concerned Guy was that the film industry appeared to have totally forgotten her. Her name was invariably omitted from cinema histories, and where her films were mentioned they were wrongly attributed to others (for many years, Victorin Jasset, her assistant, was credited as the sole author of her Gaumont masterpiece on the life of Christ). These anxieties were at least partly allayed when she was honoured with a special ceremony at the Cinémathèque française in 1957 and received the Légion d'Honneur the following year for her contribution to cinema. Yet despite this belated recognition, Guy was still unable to find a publisher for her memoirs - the book (entitled simply The Memoirs of Alice Guy-Blaché) came out some years after her death, in 1976.
Alice Guy returned to the United States in 1964 with her daughter Simone, and it was here that she remained for the rest of her life. A series of strokes robbed her of her memory and she died whilst she was a resident at a nursing home in Wayne, New Jersey, on 24th March 1968, aged 94. She is now buried at Maryrest Cemetery in New Jersey. In 1995, Marquise Lepage made a documentary about the life and work of Alice Guy entitled The Lost Garden: The Life and Cinema of Alice Guy-Blaché for the National Film Board of Canada. Not only does this include reminiscences of Guy's daughter-in-law Roberta Blaché and granddaughter Adrienne Blaché-Channing, Alice Guy also appears and speaks in some rare archive footage. Since this film was made, there has been a significant revival of interest in Alice Guy although her films are still hard to come by and she continues to be overlooked. One day, perhaps, she will receive in full the recognition that she is due, as one of the handful of visionaries who brought cinema into the world and gave us the art form that we prize so highly today.
© James Travers 2017
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