Still untold. A glitzy, wasted opportunity from Pamela B. Green (her sole feature credit as director) pays tribute to forgotten female film pioneer Alice Guy, but misses her importance. The facts get on screen, in distractingly imaginative graphics, but we never get into what made her click as a filmmaker. No comparisons with other early filmmakers. No decent length clips to help judge her. Her achievements taken on faith. Mme. Guy had yet to turn twenty when she started working for Leon Gaumont in 1895. Yep, same family as today’s distribution giant. M. Leon brought her to a preview of Lumière’s legendary/first-ever projected film showing. By the next year, Guy was directing some of the earliest film shorts. And continued doing so over the next twenty-five peripatetic years; till the film industry became big business post-WWI and women, other than actresses, writers & editors, largely disappeared from most positions. Famous for the early studio she and husband Herbert Blaché built in Fort Lee, New Jersey, he wound up directing in Hollywood* while she looked for work. It’s a fascinating story, she lived till 1968 and there are filmed interviews of her, mostly from 1964, but we never find out what we really want to know. The clips are tiny, yet collections of her work are available, but we don’t get enough to form even a preliminary opinion, or see how she was different (better?) than others at the time. Worth a look, but meaningless without better support from the films.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: A couple of years before this came out, Thierry Frémaux’s LUMIÈRE!/’16 used Auguste Lumière's eternally fresh 19th century actualités to tell his story and the story of the start of The Movies. Getting everything right this one flubs.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Husband Herbert Blaché, a far less important figure in film history (and a real shit), yet now far more seen than his wife as he directed Buster Keaton’s first feature, THE SAPHEAD/’20. Not really part of the Keaton canon, Buster only a hired actor here just as he was beginning his own post-WWI shorts and features. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-saphead-1920.html
