Bruce Calvert, Google Group

I had a really long airplane ride today, so I read most of a book called Alice Guy Blaché, Lost Visionary of the Cinema, by Alison McMahan. I already knew that Guy was the first woman who directed films. I didn't know that she directed hundreds, maybe 2000 films. Of course most were very, very short, since she started about 1896 or 1897. She was also the first woman to run a studio, which she did for Solax in Ft. Lee, New Jersey from 1910-1914.

She also directed many synchronized sound films in 1906 and 1907! They were actually like music videos of today. A singer or dancer would have their performance recorded on a disc (much like the Vitaphone disks twenty years later). Then Guy (pronounced "Giy") would film the performance, while the singer lip-synced their performance, or the dancers tried to keep up with the music. Of course the synchronization was not that great, but these films were screened in France, Germany, and the USA at the time.

After Guy and writer/director Herbert Blaché got married, she temporarily retired from Gaumont (France). But Herbert was not successful making films in the US for Gaumont, so she began working again -- writing, directing and producing films in New Jersey. By the way, Herbert was much younger than Alice!

I have not gotten to the part where she loses her studio in the US yet. Other authors have always claimed that it was because Herbert Blaché was reckless with money, as well as unfaithful to his wife Alice, but the author has already said that she can pretty much prove that theory wrong. Guy and Blaché did end up getting a divorce.

Like any book on early cinema, the author has to cover the filmmaker's struggle to figure out film language. I've only seen the word "diegesis" twice so far, so don't let that scare you away. The book also explains how the early French filmmakers Méliès, Gaumont, and Pathé, plus the American Edison studio gleefully copied each other's films -- either by re-filming them or copying them in the lab -- in the days before copyright laws had any teeth.

The book is very well researched. The endnotes and filmography alone take up about 100 pages.