This is the very first clip of a filmmaker directing.
Alice Guy shoots a phonoscene (Anonymous, 1907) - HENRI - La Cinémathèque française (cinematheque.fr)
You can see her there in the center checking in with her crew while filming a dance scene from Roméo et Juliette in 1907.
Alice Guy Blaché (neé Guy) was one of the first directors and one of the first to film narrative stories. Starting with The Cabbage Fairy in 1896, she made over 1000 films by 1920. Along the way she invented film techniques, headed the production arm of Gaumont in France and founded her own studio, Solax, in the U.S.
Her career began in Paris at seventeen when a family friend suggested classes to learn typing and stenography. Her father was dead, and her mother had recently lost her job; she needed to find work. Finishing her training at twenty years old she was hired as a secretary at a varnish factory. The lone woman among a dozen men, it was a hostile workplace with verbal harassment and intimidation. She confronted the main culprit when he followed her home one night. Surprisingly they wound up shaking hands, an early example of her mettle. Fortunately, she soon found another position at a camera manufacturing company as secretary to inventor and future cinema pioneer Léon Gaumont.
Guy was happy working at L. Gaumont et Cie. Naturally curious and technically inclined, she quickly learned about photography including types of cameras, plates (used before the invention of film), paper types, chemicals, etc. She was in meetings with many of the inventors of the day such as Gustave Eiffel who had recently completed the Eiffel Tower (1889).
A year after her arrival, Gaumont and Guy received an invitation to attend a private event where a new invention would be unveiled. On March 22, 1895 the Lumière Brothers made history by projecting a film to an audience. Called Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon it was a short clip showing women, men, dogs and bicycles literally streaming out of their photo plate factory. You can see the film and the 10 films publicly screened in December 1895 here: The First Paid Public Session - The First Session (institut-Lumière .org)
These first films were called “actualities”. Snippets of everyday life such as the Lumière baby eating lunch or short comedy bits with gardeners spraying water on people. Excited by the new technology, Gaumont began manufacturing a motion picture camera which Guy asked to borrow, “I thought that one might do better than these demonstration films. Gathering my courage, I timidly proposed to Gaumont that I might write one or two little scenes and have a few friends perform in them.”
Permission granted - as long as she only used the cameras during her off hours. In 1896 she shot her first film, The Cabbage Fairy (La Fée aux Choux), a fairytale about a couple who want to have a baby. Only a fragment of the piece has survived, a charming albeit alarming scene of a fairy frolicking in a garden pulling up live babies hidden in the cabbages.
La Fée aux Choux 1896, Guy Blaché
By 1901 she had made over 100 films and was appointed head of production for Gaumont. During this time she invented many techniques and effects including running films in reverse, slowing down or speeding up film, stop motion, double exposures, fades, reaction shots and close-ups, such as in the film Madame a des envies (Madame’s Cravings, 1906), a comedy about a pregnant woman’s cravings.
Madame a des envies (Madame’s Cravings) 1906, Guy Blaché
Movies made Gaumont so successful the board decided to build a large studio and assigned Guy to supervise. She writes in her memoir this period was initially difficult for her. In addition to overseeing the construction she had to deal with a resentful coworker who went out of his way to sabotage her, “the ill-temper that led him to commit a thousand pettiness… not only to me but also against the employees who worked under my orders…”. Undaunted, she kept the project moving forward. The newly completed studio was elaborate, taking its design from the Paris Opera with catwalks above the stage, trapdoors, and topped with a glass ceiling to let in sunlight for filming. Here she directed Esmeralda (1905), based on Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and in 1906 the 30-minute spectacle La Naissance, la Vie et la Mort du Christ (The Birth, Life and Death of Christ) with 300 extras and 25 sets.
Obsessed with adding sound to film, Gaumont invented the Chronophone in 1902. These new films were basically early music videos, called Phonoscènes. Dialog or songs were recorded on a wax disk, then actors were filmed lip syncing to the played back audio. Finally, the audio and film were shown together to an audience. Fascinated by the new technology, Guy quickly mastered it and created over 100 of these films including the video of her directing a phonoscène at the top of this post.
In March of 1907, she married 25 year old Gaumont camera operator Herbert Blaché they met when shooting a picture in the south of France. Blaché later told her he had never met anyone so cold and distant, “No doubt he was right. Still young, in a job where I had to give proof of authority, I avoided all familiarity”. The couple was sent to Cleveland, Ohio to assist a client with the Chronophone sound system. Guy was unhappy leaving France, afraid she was “abandoning my fine métier forever”. In 1908, their first child, Simone, was born and Blaché was transferred to Gaumont’s studio in Flushing, NY. This area of New York and New Jersey were the birthplace of filmmaking in the US.
In fact, Thomas Edison was in Orange, NJ busy churning out patent infringement lawsuits determined to put his movie-making competitors out of business. He formed a cartel in 1908 that controlled all access to production, distribution and exhibition. Only companies who were members of the MPPC (Motion Picture Patent Company aka Edison Trust) were able to buy film stock, shoot and distribute movies. Trust thugs would destroy sets and bully directors if they couldn’t prove membership. As a side effect this caused the unintended establishment of Hollywood as independent filmmakers fled to the west coast to stay out of reach.
Luckily, Gaumont’s distributor in Chicago was a member. However, while Gaumont could import films, they were in court battles with Edison to shoot films in the U.S. Consequently, the new Gaumont studio in Flushing where Blaché was transferred was underused. In 1910, Guy began renting it for shoots and formed her own production company, Solax, which was so successful, she invested over $100,000 to build her own studio in Fort Lee, NJ in 1912. A modern building with a processing lab, set-fabrication workshop, costume design and sewing rooms, prop rooms, projection rooms, stages under a glass roof, and offices. She accomplished this while pregnant with her son who was born in June of that year.
For two years under Guy’s leadership, Solax produced over 350 films including westerns, comedies, romantic comedies, and dramas. Solax films were distributed by the Chicago distribution company until Gaumont ended the relationship. This significantly impacted the distribution of Solax films and by 1914 Solax’s star began to wane.
Guy continued directing until 1920 with her last film Tarnished Reputations (1920). Columbia University invited her to deliver two lectures in 1917 - “The Forms in Which Scenarios Should be Presented” and “The Technique of Scenario Writing” (early screenplays were called scenarios).
A pioneer of cinema Alice Guy Blaché, like most early women in film, have been largely left out of the historical record. Even the book published by her previous boss Léon Gaumont, on the history of Gaumont Studio, failed to credit her with her groundbreaking beginnings. She eventually received recognition with France’s highest honor, the Légion d’honneur and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of America.
For more information on Guy check out the website aliceguyblache.com put together by Alison McMahan and the Women Film Pioneers Project website wfpp.columbia.edu hosted by Columbia University Libraries. Quotes from Guy are taken from her book, The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché translated by Roberta Blaché and Simone Blaché, edited by Anthony Slide.