Alison McMahan - Alice Guy Blache: Lost Visionary of the Cinema

ALICE GUY BLACH:
LOST VISIONARY OF THE CINEMA

Series Editors: Pam Cook, University of Southampton

Ginette Vincendeau, University of Warwick

Women Make Cinema is a ground-breaking series dedicated to celebrating the contribution of women to all aspects of film-making throughout the world. Until recently feminist criticism has focused on the exclusion of women from mainstream cinema, emphasizing the relatively small number of women directors and their restricted opportunities. Women Make Cinema assesses the historical impact of women as both producers and consumers of cinematic images. As stars, directors, scriptwriters, editors, producers, designers, critics and audiences, they have exerted a powerful influence on world cinema. This series opens up this hidden history, giving women a central place in the development of cinema.

Already available:

Heroines without Heroes: Reconstructing Female and National Identities in European Cinema, 194551, edited by Ulrike Sieglohr

Cinema and the Second Sex: Womens Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s, by Carrie Tarr with Brigitte Rollet

Forthcoming:

Simone Signoret, by Susan Hayward

Gaslight Melodrama, by Guy Barefoot

Batman Unmasked, by Will Brooker

Women in British Cinema, by Sue Harper

Oscar Fever, by Emanuel Levy

Stars and Stardom in French Cinema, by Ginette Vincendeau

Lost Visionary of the Cinema

Alison McMahan

Bloomsbury Academic
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First published in 2003 by the Continuum International Publishing Group Inc

2002 by Alison McMahan

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McMahan, Alison.
Alice Guy Blach: Lost Visionary of the Cinema/Alison McMahan.
p.cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8264-5158-6 (hardbound) 0-8264-5157-8 (paperback) alk.paper
1. Guy, Alice, 18731968. 2. Motion picture producers and
directors-France-Biography. I. Title
PN1998.3.G89 M39 2002
791.430233081dc21

2001047720

eISBN-13: 978-1-5013-0268-8

THIS BOOK WAS ten years in the making. It started out as a doctoral thesis at the Union Institute, and benefitted greatly from the academic support of my doctoral committee: Susan Amussen, Mary Sheerin, Anthony Slide, Richard Abel, Antonia Lant, Anne Will, Carol DeBoer-Langworthy and Victor Bachy.

Alice Guys family was incredibly generous in its participation. Roberta Blach, Alice Guy Blachs daughter-in-law, let me look through Guy Blachs documents, letters and mementos, as well as shared her personal memories with me. Her daughter, Adrienne Channing, Adriennes husband Bob, Guys other grandaughter, Rgine Blach Bolton, and Gabriel Allignet, Guy Blachs nephew, all shared their memories of Alice Guy with me and often let me look at family documents.

A book like this is impossible without the help of archivists. I am particularly grateful to Marianne Chanel, the curator of the Muse Gaumont, who opened all the files in her archives, helped me cut through red tape, gave me free (!) access to the photocopier, made sure I got the slides I ordered before I went home and allowed me to look through materials that were being organized for an exhibit and were technically off-limits. She also introduced me to Mr. Allignet. Graham Melville at the National Film and Television Archive in London did many of the same things Marianne did, and brought to it his own interest in early cinema. He also put me in touch with scholars working in related areas. I am also grateful to Elaine Burrows and her staff at the BFI. Rosemary Haines and Madeline Katz at the Motion Picture Division of the Library of Congress were generous with their time, assistance and expertise, as were Paolo Cherchi Usai and his staff at the George Eastman House, Christopher Horak at the Stadtmuseum in Munich and Charles Silver and Ron Maggliozzi at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Sabine Lenk, then at the Cinmathque Royale de Belgique, started what has become a beautiful friendship by responding to my first letter of inquiry with an incredibly detailed answer filled with names and addresses. Once we met in Brussels, she then introduced me to Jeanine Baj and together we identified one of the films in the Alan Roberts collection. Since then Sabine, Frank Kessler and Martin Loiperdinger have helped me greatly with their comments, encouragement and friendship. I am extremely grateful to Serge Bromberg of Red Lobster Films in Paris for access to films in his collection and information about them. Madeleine Bernstorff, an independent organizer of film retrospectives and art exhibits on women artists in Germany helped me make appointments and see films in Munich and Berlin and introduced me to the curators of various archives, also translating for me when necessary. Louise Anderson, the organizer of the Symposium on early women filmmakers at the Museum of the Moving Image in London did her job with competence and grace, helped me when the films I wanted to screen as part of my presentation were lost and managed to get a copy of Cupid and the Comet from Munich so that we could screen it. Christian Delage selected me as part of the Gaumont Centenary research team giving me access to the Gaumont files at the Cinmathque Franaise, where Laurent Mannoni was very helpful. Jessica Rossner at Kino Video in New York has been extremely supportive and helpful.

I am also very grateful to Nico de Klerk and Nicoline Witte and the entire staff at the Nederlands Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, for all their support for me and my Early Film History students while I was teaching at the University of Amsterdam. I am especially grateful to my MA and doctorandus students in Film History at the University of Amsterdam from 1997 to 2001, for eager participation in my courses and their frequent insights. I thank the Film and Television Studies program and Professor Elsaesser for making it possible for my students to program their own early film shows at the Nederland Filmmuseum and for their overall support of work in early cinema. I also thank my co-teachers for the Film History courses, Andre Waardenburg and Franca Jonquire. I owe a debt of gratitude to the Archimedia program in Europe, its organizers and participants.

I owe an infinite debt to Marquise Lepage, the National Film Board of Canada director who hired me as a researcher and later line producer on her documentary about Guy Blach, thus making all of her findings accessible to me and allowing me to see some of the Guy Blach films that I otherwise would not have seen until much later or not at all. Ms. Lepage also introduced me to Roberta Blach. Joan Simon provided tremendous encouragement to me, for my project as a whole, and especially for pushing me to continue with the work and turn my dissertation into a book. Ms. Simon has almost single handedly raised the money to preserve many of the rapidly decomposing Guy films.