Told in the first person, this documentary renders his room for the first director and the first producer of fiction films, whose name was erased from the history of the 7th art.
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First director and first producer of fiction films, active active of the invention of the cinematograph, Alice Guy (1873-1968) almost disappeared from the memoirs as in the history of the e art . Like his works, more than 500, forgotten, destroyed or attributed to men around his entourage to better erase the trace of this pioneer without equal.
Could it be the time of consecration? His autobiography, published eight years after his death, did not awaken – she will only be translated into English only twenty years later. And if, twenty-five years ago, the singer Juliette celebrated among the heroines of his female rhymes this memorable woman, between Arletty, Kiki of Montparnasse, Yourcenar or Josephine Baker, she remains well insulated, until the publication twelve years ago Later of several DVDs (Looking for Alice, Claudia Collao, or the first component of Gaumont, the first film, from Pierre Philippe, which offers, in addition to a documentary, more than sixty short films of the “first film film in the world “).
Ten years of patience again and finally comes the action of Véronique Le Bris, who chooses this incredible figure for the annual price it creates in 2018 to celebrate and enhance the work of women filmmakers – first prize Alice-Guy Crowned Paris La Blanche, from Lidia Terki -, before selecting two works by Alice Guy among the 100 large film movies. From the fairy to cabbage in Wonder Woman, when women seize cinema (Gründ-Arte ed., 2021).
The year when Julia Ducornau, finalist, with serious, at first prize Alice-Guy, picks up, for titanium, the first gold palm devolved without sharing a woman, seems at Castterman Alice Guy (400 pages, 24.95 euros), fourth heroine of these “clandestines of history” that celebrate, drawing and scenario, Catel Muller and José-Louis Bocquet. A great sum on a major designer, which will scrupulously consider the beginnings of the cinema as well as those of Alice Guy.
Audace Feminist
CATEL MULLER is also present in the documentary that Valerie Urrea and Nathalie Masduraud, ideal complement of the “bio-graph” of Casterman, since, if the subject is naturally the same – more dissected however on the American course of Alice Guy -, we discover excerpts from the film’s films, as the testimony of an old lady with a sparkling eye and refreshing memory.
Curious and savvy, inventive and voluntary, the young woman, stenodactylo, becomes 21 years old the secretary of Leon Gaumont, director of the general counter of photography, and proposes to her in 1895, when the cinematograph is born, to make fictions for Support the sales of cameras and projectors of the house. More than ten years, with sometimes a feminist audacity assumed, she feeds the Gaumont catalog and wins a success comparable to that of Georges Méliès’ fairy.
Later, established on the Atlantic, she is the first woman to create a production company, the Solax Film Co (1910). In search of his films that have become invisible, Alice Guy, octogenarian, tells the smooth-traps tense with a very real machism and the disappointments she recorded, betrayed by her husband, herbert blazed, operator for the Agence Gaumont, which she followed in the United States, without finding, ruined and divorced, on his return to France (1922) for his measure, his name having disappeared from the nascent stories of cinema. One hundred years later, it is only time to give him a full justice.