Reel Women

Still from "The Ocean Waif"

While in Michigan, I happened to stop in some excellent used bookstores, such as John K. King in Detroit and Dawn Treader in Ann Arbor. However, The Curious Book Shop in East Lansing had the most film-related items, including old movie posters, playbills, and fan magazines like "Photoplay." It was there that I bought a cheap copy of a 1991 book by Ally Acker called REEL WOMEN: Pioneers of the Cinema.

Like most books I own, I've read a third of it and I'll probably stop there, due to my fleeting, hummingbird-size attention span. But what I've read so far has been illuminating! In film school, I took a typical Film History 101 class, (specifically, this one with Hubert I. Cohen) where we learned about the Great Men of Film, like Eiseinstein and Bergman and Godard and Hitchcock. I don't remember learning about Alice Guy Blaché in that class, or in any formal academic setting, and yet, according to this book, she was an instrumental and influential part of film history. As late as 1968, her contributions were being erased and revised. An excerpt from REEL WOMEN:

In The Dictionary of Filmmakers, published in 1968 by Georges Sedoul, the first director in history, Alice Guy Blaché, is listed in this way:

Guy Blaché, Alice... Originally Leon Gaumont's secretary when he was still only making film equipment. She began making short films intended for use as demonstrations for clients. She made her first film, LA FEE AUX CHOUX [1896] some months before Méliès, thus becoming the first woman director in the world.

The entry under "Méliès" in the same book describes him as the first director of "story films." Not the first man director, but the first director. Although Blaché's film was not specifically made as an entertainment vehicle, it was certainly a fictional story film. (LA FEE AUX CHOUX [The Cabbage Fairy], concerned a fairy who "made" children in a cabbage patch). Yet Sedoul chose to invent a subcategory "woman director" for Blaché  presumably in order to reserve the title "first director" for a man. 

From minimal internet searching, it's clear that film buffs and academics alike are now very aware of her work. But if you're like me, and formerly unfamiliar with this remarkable person, here is a lovely, brief introduction to Blaché's life, with University of Nebraska-Lincoln Film Studies professor Wheeler Winston Dixon.