Alice Guy Blaché : lost visionary of the cinema

404 Pages·2002·20.7 MB·English

by  Guy

ALICE GUY BLACHE:
LOST VISIONARY OF THE CINEMA
Women Make Cinema
Series Editors: Pam Cook, University of Southampton
Ginette Vincendeau, University of Warwick
Women Make Cinema is a ground-breaking series dedicated to
celebrating the contribution of women to all aspects of film-making
throughout the world. Until recently feminist criticism has focused on the
exclusion of women from mainstream cinema, emphasizing the relatively
small number of women directors and their restricted opportunities.
Women Make Cinema assesses the historical impact of women as both
producers and consumers of cinematic images. As stars, directors,
scriptwriters, editors, producers, designers, critics and audiences, they
have exerted a powerful influence on world cinema. This series opens up
this hidden history, giving women a central place in the development of
cinema.
Already available:
Heroines without Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities
in European Cinema, 1945-51, edited by Ulrike Sieglohr
Cinema and the Second Sex: Women's Filmmaking in France in the
1980s and 1990s, by Carrie Tarr with Brigitte Rollet
Forthcoming:
Simone Signoret, by Susan Hayward
Also of interest from Bloomsbury:
Gaslight Melodrama, by Guy Barefoot
Batman Unmasked, by Will Brooker
Women in British Cinema, by Sue Harper
Oscar® Fever, by Emanuel Levy
Stars and Stardom in French Cinema, by Ginette Vincendeau
ALICE GUY BLACHE
Lost Visionary of the Cinema
Alison McMahan
B L O O M S B U RY
NEW YORK • LONDON • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY
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First published in 2003 by the Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
O 2002 by Alison McMahan
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McMahan, Alison.
Alice Guy Blache: Lost Visionary of the Cinema/Alison McMahan.
p.cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8264-5158-6 (hardbound) 0-8264-5157-8 (paperback) alk.paper
1. Guy, Alice, 1873-1968. 2. Motion picture producers and
directors-France-Biography. I. Title
PN1998.3.G89 M39 2002
791.43'0233'0814~21
2001047720
ISBN: HB: 978-0-8264-5158-3
PB: 978-0-8264-5157-6
ePDF: 978-1-5013-0269-5
ePUB: 978-1-5013-0268-8
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
DEDICATION xi
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xiii
KEY DATES IN THE LIFE OF ALICE GUY BLACHE xvii
INTRODUCTION: The Search for Alice Guy Blache xxiii
CHAPTER ONE: The Birth of Film Narrative 1
CHAPTER Two: Sound Rewrites Silents: Alice Guy
and The Gaumont Chronophone 43
CHAPTER THREE: The Growth of Narrative:
Alice Guy's Silent Film Production at Gaumont,
1902-1907 78
CHAPTER FOUR: Solax: An American Film Company 110
CHAPTER FIVE: Feature-length Films and the End of
the Solax Company 154
CHAPTER Six: Madame a des envies (Madame has
her Cravings): Cross-dressing in the Comedies
of Alice Guy 206
CONCLUSION 242
APPENDIX A: A Standard Identification Process,
Or How the Work of Alice Guy has benefitted
from increased communication between
researchers (by Sabine Lenk) 277
Alice Guy in the NFTVA (by Graham Melville) 281
APPENDIX B: Extant Films of Alice Guy 288
APPENDIX C: Complete Filmography 298
Gaumont Films 299
Sound Films 320
Solax Films 325
BIBLIOGRAPHY 340
INDEX 349
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Acknowledgments
T HIS BOOK WAS ten years in the making. It started out as a doc-
toral thesis at the Union Institute, and benefitted greatly from the
academic support of my doctoral committee: Susan Amussen, Mary
Sheerin, Anthony Slide, Richard Abel, Antonia Lant, Anne Will,
Carol DeBoer-Langworthy and Victor Bachy.
Alice Guy's family was incredibly generous in its participation.
Roberta Blache, Alice Guy Blache's daughter-in-law, let me look
through Guy Blache's documents, letters and mementos, as well as
shared her personal memories with me. Her daughter, Adrienne
Channing, Adrienne's husband Bob, Guy's other grandaughter,
Regine Blache Bolton, and Gabriel Allignet, Guy Blache's nephew,
all shared their memories of Alice Guy with me and often let me look
at family documents.
A book like this is impossible without the help of archivists. I am
particularly grateful to Marianne Chanel, the curator of the Musee
Gaumont, who opened all the files in her archives, helped me cut
through red tape, gave me free (!) access to the photocopier, made sure
I got the slides I ordered before I went home and allowed me to look
through materials that were being organized for an exhibit and were
technically off-limits. She also introduced me to Mr. Allignet. Graham
Melville at the National Film and Television Archive in London did
many of the same things Marianne did, and brought to it his own
interest in early cinema. He also put me in touch with scholars
working in related areas. I am also grateful to Elaine Burrows and
her staff at the BFI. Rosemary Haines and Madeline Katz at the
Motion Picture Division of the Library of Congress were generous
with their time, assistance and expertise, as were Paolo Cherchi
Usai and his staff at the George Eastman House, Christopher Horak
at the Stadtmuseum in Munich and Charles Silver and Ron Magg-
liozzi at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Sabine Lenk,
then at the Cinematheque Royale de Belgique, started what has
become a beautiful friendship by responding to my first letter of
viii ALICE GUY BLACHE: LOST VISIONARY OF THE CINEMA
inquiry with an incredibly detailed answer filled with names and
addresses. Once we met in Brussels, she then introduced me to
Jeanine Baj and together we identified one of the films in the Alan
Roberts collection. Since then Sabine, Frank Kessler and Martin
Loiperdinger have helped me greatly with their comments, encourage-
ment and friendship. I am extremely grateful to Serge Bromberg of
Red Lobster Films in Paris for access to films in his collection and
information about them. Madeleine Bernstorff, an independent organ-
izer of film retrospectives and art exhibits on women artists in
Germany helped me make appointments and see films in Munich and
Berlin and introduced me to the curators of various archives, also
translating for me when necessary. Louise Anderson, the organizer
of the Symposium on early women filmmakers at the Museum of the
Moving Image in London did her job with competence and grace,
helped me when the films I wanted to screen as part of my presen-
tation were lost and managed to get a copy of Cupid and the Comet
from Munich so that we could screen it. Christian Delage selected
me as part of the Gaumont Centenary research team giving me
access to the Gaumont files at the Cinematheque Francaise, where
Laurent Mannoni was very helpful. Jessica Rossner at Kino Video in
New York has been extremely supportive and helpful.
I am also very grateful to Nico de Klerk and Nicoline Witte and the
entire staff at the Nederlands Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, for all
their support for me and my Early Film History students while I
was teaching at the University of Amsterdam. I am especially grateful
to my MA and doctorandus students in Film History at the University
of Amsterdam from 1997 to 2001, for eager participation in my
courses and their frequent insights. I thank the Film and Television
Studies program and Professor Elsaesser for making it possible for
my students to program their own early film shows at the Nederland
Filmmuseum and for their overall support of work in early cinema.
I also thank my co-teachers for the Film History courses, Andre
Waardenburg and Franca Jonquiere. I owe a debt of gratitude to the
Archimedia program in Europe, its organizers and participants.
I owe an infinite debt to Marquise Lepage, the National Film
Board of Canada director who hired me as a researcher and later line
producer on her documentary about Guy Blache, thus making all of
her findings accessible to me and allowing me to see some of the Guy
Blache films that I otherwise would not have seen until much later
or not at all. Ms. Lepage also introduced me to Roberta Blache.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
Joan Simon provided tremendous encouragement to me, for my
project as a whole, and especially for pushing me to continue with
the work and turn my dissertation into a book. Ms. Simon has
almost single handedly raised the money to preserve many of the rap-
idly decomposing Guy films.
I am extremely grateful to Claire Dupre La Tour, Malte Hagener,
Sabine Lenk and Holland Westreich for their assistance in inter-
preting German and French materials.
My research has especially benefitted from previous work by
Anthony Slide, Felicity Sparrow, Victor Bachy and Richard Abel.
I would like to thank Richard Abel, Rick Altman, Mieke Bal, Ivo
Blom, Francois de la Breteque, Marco Bertozzi, Warren Buckland,
Edwin Carels, Richard Crangle, Claire Dupre La Tour, Elizabeth
Ezra, Annete Forster, Andre Gaudreault, Frank Kessler, Richard
Koszarski, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Sabine Lenk, Martin Loiperdinger,
Charlie Musser, Dominique Nasta, Richard Porton, Catherine
Preston, Jan Olson, Simon Popple, Vanessa Thoulmin, Anthony
Slide, Chris Straayer, William Urrichio, Eva Warth, Michiel Wedel,
Alan Williams, and Sasha Vojkovic for reading parts of the manu-
script at different stages and providing insights and comments or
for their extra insights given at conferences.
Parts of this book were given as papers at the following con-
ferences: DOMITOR Conference New York (1994) Paris (1996)
and Washington, D.C. (1998); Congres Lumiere, Lyons, June 1995;
the Columbia Series Seminar, Columbia University in New York,
1995; Prima dell 'Autore, Spettacolo Cinematografico, testo, auto-
rialita dalle origini agli anni Trenta Conference sponsored by the
University of Bologna in Udine, Italy March 1996; The Back in the
Saddle Conference, University of Utrecht, July 1997; the SCS Con-
ference in San Diego, April 1998 and Washington DC, 2001; the
Technologies of the Moving Image Conference, Stockholm University,
December 1998; the Visual Delights Conference, Sheffield University,
June 1999; the Gender and Early Cinema conference, University of
Utrecht, October 1999; the Spectacular Europe 3 Conference in
Warwick, UK, March 2000; the Archimedia 2000 Conference in
Brussels and 2001 in Amsterdam. I benefitted greatly from the stim-
ulating environment provided at these conferences. I am also grateful
to the organizers of the Silent Pioneer Day at the Museum of the
Moving Image, London June 1995, especially Louise Anderson; to
the organizers of the Festival des Films de Femmes, Creteil (Paris) of