Alice Guy-Blaché (1 July 1873 – 24 March 1968) was a pioneer filmmaker who was the first female director in the motion picture industry and is considered to be one of the first directors of a fiction film. In 1894 Alice Guy was hired by Léon Gaumont to work for a still-photography company as a secretary. The company soon went out of business but Gaumont bought the defunct operations inventory and began his own company that soon became a major force in the fledgling motion picture industry in France. Alice Guy decided to join the new Gaumont Film Company, a decision that led to a pioneering career in filmmaking spanning more than twenty-five years and involving her directing, producing, writing and/or overseeing more than 700 films.
From 1897 to 1906, Alice Guy was Gaumont's head of production and is generally considered to be the first filmmaker to systematically develop narrative filmmaking. Many film historians have accepted that her film La Fée aux Choux was made in April 1896, just a month or two before Georges Méliès made his first fiction film (the Lumière brothers' L'Arroseur arrosé, generally considered the earliest fiction film, was screened in December 1895). In the sixty second film, Guy Blaché appears dressed as a man.
In 1906, she made her first full length feature film, titled The Life of Christ, a big budget production for the time, which included 300 extras. That same year she also made the film La Fée Printemps (The Spring Fairy), one of the first movies ever to be shot in color. As well, she pioneered the use of recordings in conjunction with the images on screen in Gaumont's "Chronophone" system, which used a vertical-cut disc synchronized to the film. An innovator, she employed special effects, using double exposure masking techniques and even running a film backwards. Read more...