Alice Guy in 1896
Hélène Février has written an article about Alice Guy for TV5Monde. It's a great article, and includes links to some of her most important films. What's most important about this article is that it is written in French, as France and French scholars by and large have proved that the old saying about prophets being rejected in their own country is absolutely true of France.
Here is my translation of the opening paragraphs:
Jane Campion is President of the Jury of the 67th Cannes Film Festival, which takes place May 14 to May 25, 2014. She is also the only woman to have joined the very exclusive and very masculine circle of directors who received the Palme d'Or. Yet long ago, at the end of the nineteenth century, Alice Guy, a French woman, had managed to get a place among the elite of the nascent film industry. Independent, talented and incredibly avant-garde woman, she is the first woman film director and producer in the world. A life course unfortunately unknown to the general public.
"Alice ... who?" Alice Guy. "Haven't heard of her? No surprise there. And yet she is one of the greatest figures of the silent films of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Born in France in 1873 into a bourgeois family, Alice Guy was not destined to a life and career worthy of a Hollywood film. But fate decided otherwise. Following the bankruptcy of the family business in Chile and the successive deaths of her brother and father, Alice Guy, then aged 17, moved to Paris with her mother. She studied shorthand and stenography and in 1895 went to work as a secretary for a photography company in Paris, hired by... Léon Gaumont. Without knowing it, Alice Guy had started a career in the cinema that would last 28 years.
You can read the entire article here. Even if you don't read French, check out the pictures and the clips. Last but not least, note the interview with me along the side.