“There is nothing connected with the staging of a motion picture that a woman cannot do as easily as a man, and there is no reason she cannot master every technicality of the art”. - Alice Guy-Blaché
Like many industries today, the film industry has been subject to much scrutiny over gender discrimination, sexism and predatory behaviours within the last decade. For good reason a light has been shone on the institutional mistreatment of women - a culture that has been allowed to exist due to decades of male control within the hegemony of the large, market-leading studios. Since 2017, the #MeToo movement has been pivotal in initiating awareness and justice for victims of predators within Hollywood and the wider industry. Along with equality and diversity policies and earlier feminist efforts, the attention on the industry’s systemic gender issues is creating a platform for more women to claim positions of power and influence. This progress is perceived today as pushing the film industry forward in its inclusion of women in directorial, production-based and corporate roles. However, to talk about progress is to insinuate that the film industry of the past excluded women and forced them into positions of inferiority. While this was partly the case for a long time, the formative years of the film industry were shaped by many women who pioneered the practice and dared to experiment with the burgeoning technology of the time. For over a century these women’s contributions to cinema history have been all but forgotten. Their works have been lost, overlooked and miscredited. It’s time that these women are restored to their former glory and remembered for their valuable influence on the film industry and its future.
The mother of narrative film: Alice Guy-Blaché
Towards the end of the 19th century, many inventors, engineers, and entrepreneurs were caught up in the race to develop the leading method of filming and exhibiting moving pictures. Ultimately, the Lumière brothers are widely credited as the ones to do this in Paris, France, in March 1895 when they showcased their invention the Cinématographe. The Lumières’ films were essentially documentaries: minute-long depictions of ordinary life made purely to show off their new technology. While the earliest film exhibitions did attract crowds, this was based more on the aesthetic and sensational appeal of moving pictures and their novelty as a relatively new medium of entertainment. It wasn’t until later that the potential of narrative film was realised. Twenty-two year old Alice Guy was in attendance at that first commercial film screening. Secretary to Léon Gaumont (who went on to found Gaumont Film Company which became the first film studio in the world), she had developed interest and expertise in cameras through her dealings with clients and a handful of engineers. Excited by the potential of film, Guy asked Gaumont if she could make her own film, to which he agreed (as long as it didn’t interfere with her secretarial work). With the creation of La Fée Aux Choux / The Cabbage Fairy (1896), narrative film was born. Like many early films, the original version perished; Guy’s 1900 remake, depicting a fairy who conjures babies out of cabbage patches, is the version most familiar to audiences today. From 1896 to 1906, Guy was the only woman in the world creating films, making her the first female filmmaker. Gaumont soon made Guy head of production for the entire company, solidifying her significance in the history of film. She held this position until she departed to the United States in 1907 with her husband Herbert Blaché.
They relocated because Herbert, who also worked for the Gaumont company, was transferred to Flushing, New York to oversee the studio there. Due to disputes over technology and film distribution rights involving Thomas Edison, by 1910 operation at the Gaumont plant had essentially ended. Seeing the opportunity presented to her, Alice Guy-Blaché established her own production company on the Gaumont site, thus founding the Solax Company. Guy-Blaché’s films at Solax are characterised by their on-location shooting and preference for realism, which differed from the convention of studio-shooting; a sign telling actors to “Be Natural” hung on one studio wall. By 1912 the Solax Company had raised enough funds for Alice (who was pregnant) and Herbert to build their own studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Fort Lee was emerging as a centre for early silent film production so Guy-Blaché’s presence among industry leaders signifies her success as a filmmaker. The studio successfully moved from only producing shorts to also releasing feature-length films, however growing costs and the ever-growing appeal of the West Coast later caused trouble for Solax.
Alice Guy-Blaché is believed to have written, directed and produced around 1,000 films during her career. Unfortunately, only 150 are currently known to have survived; others may have been attributed to other directors, but Guy-Blaché worked tirelessly to reclaim many of her works before her death in 1963. One of her notable films from her Solax years was In The Year 2000 (1912), a remake of her 1906 Gaumont production Les Résultats du Féminisme. These films depict a world in which male and female gender roles are reversed (I'm sure Alice would've loved Greta Gerwig's Barbie). She also created a handful of female action films, which were a timely response to the ‘serial queens’ trend in silent cinema. The ‘serial queens’ were well-loved stars of serialised short films about the adventures of female action heroes, including serials like The Perils of Pauline (1914) and The Hazards of Helen (1914-1917). Guy-Blaché is also recognised for directing one of the first films with an all-black cast, if not the first. A Fool and His Money (1912) is by no means progressive in its representation of race, but its cast represents a significant piece of cinema history.
After her divorce from Herbert and handling the bankruptcy of the Solax Company in 1922, Guy-Blaché returned to Paris where she began lecturing in film. Despite assisting her ex-husband on three films in Los Angeles, Alice was largely uninvolved in the booming Hollywood scene of cinema, and her name was omitted from many historical accounts of the early cinema industry. Towards the end of her life she became focused on reclaiming her name and tracking down lost works, endeavouring to have herself remembered as the pioneer she was. Slowly, she received some film accreditation, however it was not until 1968, some years after her death, that feminist film scholars acknowledged Alice’s existence and her role in cinema history was rightfully recognised. Pamela B. Green’s 2018 documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché is a tender and informative exploration of Guy-Blaché’s work I absolutely recommend to anyone interested in learning more .
America’s first female director: Lois Weber
Lois Weber’s film career began in New York, where she had worked in theatre with her husband, Phillips Smalley, before working with the Rex Motion Picture Company. In 1913, the couple relocated to the ever-growing film community in Los Angeles where they signed contracts to write and direct under Universal studios. Before long, Weber, often publicly known as Mrs. Smalley, was a leading director at Universal Pictures. An early pop-culture ‘power couple’, the Smalleys collaborated on films together, but by 1916 it was evident that Lois was the dominant force in their filmmaking partnership. She wrote their scripts and directed many of their works. Phillips understood his wife’s expertise to such an extent that he was frequently observed turning to Lois for advice on important decisions. Her knowledge and artistic authority was evident in their working relationship.
Weber experienced the height of her success in the mid-1910s. In these years she was often mentioned in print as one of the top Hollywood talents, considered with key filmmakers like D.W. Griffith (director of the racist film Birth Of A Nation (1915)), and Cecil B. DeMille, who later directed Sunset Boulevard (1950). In 1916 she was also the first and only woman elected to the Motion Picture Directors Association, remaining the only woman to do so before the association made way for the Screen Actors Guild in 1936. Throughout her career, Weber fostered not only her own successful career, but also the careers of various rising stars by supporting them in their journey to becoming Hollywood actresses.
Following her successful years at Universal, Weber established her own company called Lois Weber Productions, in 1917. Here she was able to forgo the thematic constraints Universal placed on her (they thought the films she wanted to make were too ‘domestic’) and began making the most intimate films of her career. Under the name of her own studio she endeavoured to write more complex parts for women. She was aware of Hollywood’s inclination to prescribe women one-dimensional labels like ‘flapper’ or ‘wife.’ Weber always had a tendency to write and direct films speaking to the social issues of her time. Films such as John Doe (1916), Where Are My Children? (1916) and Shoes (1916) discussed the abolition of capital punishment, legalisation of birth control, and urban poverty, demonstrating her penchant for social commentary in her filmmaking. One of the earliest proponents for film as a powerful medium for narrative drama, Weber hoped for her films to “have an influence for good on the public mind”, distinguishing herself from other (male) filmmakers whose aim for film was to associate it with highbrow culture in order to validate itself as an artform. Like her contemporaries, Lois used new filmmaking techniques, such as split-screen (Suspense, from 1913, or over-exposure effects (Where Are My Children?), but in some cases before they did. These are elements of their filmmaking that have long been praised by film historians and early film fans. However, Weber’s recognition as an experimenter has not been well documented.
After only a few years, Lois Weber Productions began to struggle and Weber’s output slowed from 1922. Some have noted that the end of her marriage that year was partly to do with this, citing her dependence on Phillips in the business-side of the company as more necessary to her success than she had led people to think. However, she was not the only person or company to struggle at this time; in fact, Lois did continue making a few more films after her divorce- something that her ex-husband never attempted. More important than the divorce to her eventual decline was the changing structure of the Hollywood film industry which favoured the mass-production and investment only the large studios could afford. Many independent studios could not compete. It is commendable that Lois’ career weathered the transition from silent to sound cinema after 1929 with her final feature White Heat (1934).
Remaining as early Hollywood’s only female director during the, Weber’s films took on a low cultural value. Her work was marketed as ‘women’s films’, no longer perceived with the prestige and quality of her earlier releases. Upon her death at age 60 in 1939, Lois Weber’s eulogy described her as only a “star maker”, remembered not for her own successful and celebrated career, but for her ability to begin other actresses’ careers. Tragically, her 25 years in the film industry and writing and directing credits on 40 features and 100 shorts were omitted.
Fading to obscurity
Towards the end of the 1920s, many filmmakers and performers failed to hold the same prestige in the film industry that they had experienced at the peak of their silent film careers since the early 1900s. Anyone who’s seen Singin’ In The Rain (1952) will understand the difficulties many careers faced during this shift to synchronised sound. Most production had moved to Hollywood, capitalist studios were beginning to hold the monopoly on distribution and exhibition, and positions within studios were becoming increasingly gendered, pushing women out of executive roles. At the beginning of their careers, female filmmakers had been relatively free to contribute to the new medium behind the scenes as no expectations of what the commercial film industry should be, or what it would become, existed. Women’s ‘moral superiority’ was actually used as a legitimation force, assuring audiences of the virtue of the new means of entertainment. As time progressed and a small collection of studios consolidated their power over the entire industry, men asserted themselves in positions of authority, while the artistic qualities associated with women and their femininity were no longer a hallmark of quality filmmaking, seen rather as excessive and outdated. Lois Weber was essentially written out of history while she was still an active filmmaker; her male contemporaries cemented their legacy while she battled to find work.
Themes of being lost, disregarded, and unappreciated arise when considering early film’s female pioneers. MacMahan has named Alice Guy-Blaché “the lost visionary of cinema” and her work a “lost garden”, while Weber was “forgotten with a vengeance” according to Richard Koszarski. In fact, the presence of women within the dominant Hollywood film industry was all but nothing until many decades later, and even then it is debatable whether that has changed enough. Dorothy Arzner is regarded by many as the only female director in the “Golden Age” of Hollywood, with this title remaining well into the twentieth century.
Remembering film’s female pioneers
When elevating contemporary women within the film industry we should draw attention to their predecessors, who not only were a part of this burgeoning craft, but influenced the conventions we associate with commercial cinema today. Alice Guy-Blaché told The Moving Picture World in 1914 that “there is nothing connected with the staging of a motion picture that a woman cannot do as easily as a man, and there is no reason she cannot master every technicality of the art”. These words have never felt truer than today, when more women’s voices are being heard as they claim positions of artistic authority. There was never any inevitability that men would dominate filmmaking. In fact, the women active in the earliest version of the film industry held a significant share of the workload. In the act of bringing more women to the forefront today, we can also lift up these women of the past who did so much to
put their mark on the history of cinema. It’s also worth noting that I’ve only mentioned two women in this article. Ruth Ann Baldwin, Nell Shipman, and the first Black female filmmaker Maria P. Williams are just a few of the incredible women whose works have been lost and unappreciated over the last 100 years. By recognising them as not only women who were trailblazers, but also as pioneering filmmakers in their own right, we challenge contemporary representations of historical women. These women’s personal achievements and names should be recognised for their importance to film history alongside other well-documented visionaries in the story of film.
Further reading:
Dargis, Manohla, ‘Overlooked No More: Alice Guy-Blaché, the World’s First Female Filmmaker’, The New York Times, 2019, via <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/obituaries/alice-guy-blache-overlooked.html>
Gaines, Jane and Radha Vatsal, ‘How Women Worked in the US Silent Film Industry’, Women Film Pioneers Project, 2011, via <https://wfpp.columbia.edu/essay/how-women-worked-in-the-us-silent-film-industry/>
McMahan, Alison, ‘Alice Guy-Blaché’, Women Film Pioneers Project, 2018, via <https://wfpp.columbia.edu/pioneer/ccp-alice-guy-blache/>
The Moving Picture World, 11 July 1914
O’Hara, Helen, Women Vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film (London: Robinson, 2021)
Photoplay, 1913, p. 73
Rose, Steve, ‘Why was pioneering director Alice Guy-Blaché erased from film-making history?’, The Guardian, 2020, via <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jan/20/why-was-pioneering-director-alice-guy-blache-erased-from-film-making-history#:~:text=Being%20a%20woman%20was%20no,even%20attributed%20to%20the%20men.>
Stamp, Shelley, ‘Lois Weber’, Women Film Pioneers Project, 2013, via <https://wfpp.columbia.edu/pioneer/ccp-lois-weber/>
Lois Weber in Early Hollywood (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), via <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt13x1gnm>
Filmography
A Fool and His Money, dir. by Alice Guy-Blaché (The Solax Company, 1912)
Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, dir. by Pamela B. Green (Zeitgeist Films, 2018)
Danse Des Papillons, dir. by Alice Guy-Blaché (Gaumont, 1897)
In The Year 2000, dir. by Alice Guy-Blaché (The Solax Company, 1912)
La Fée Aux Choux/ The Cabbage Fairy, dir. by Alice Guy-Blaché (Gaumont, 1896)
Les Résultats du Féminisme, dir. by Alice Guy-Blaché (Gaumont, 1906)
The People vs. John Doe, dir. by Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley (Universal, 1916)
Shoes, dir. by Lois Weber (Universal, 1916)
Suspense, dir. by Lois Weber (Universal, 1913)
Where Are My Children?, dir. by Lois Weber (Universal, 1916)
White Heat, dir. by Lois Weber (Pinnacle Production Company, 1934)