Which of the below was not one of the first pioneers in film invention or production?

From 1896 to 1906 Alice Guy was probably the only woman film director in the world. She had begun as a secretary for Léon Gaumont and made her first film in 1896. After that first film, she directed and produced or supervised almost six hundred silent films ranging in length from one minute to thirty minutes, the majority of which were of the single-reel length. In addition, she also directed and produced or supervised one hundred and fifty synchronized sound films for the Gaumont Chronophone. Her Gaumont silent films are notable for their energy and risk-taking; her preference for real locations gives the extant examples of these Gaumont films a contemporary feel. As Alan Williams has described her influence, Alice Guy “created and nurtured the mood of excitement and sheer aesthetic pleasure that one senses in so many pre-war Gaumont films, including the ones made after her departure from the Paris studio” (57). Most notable of her Gaumont period films is La Vie du Christ (1906), a thirty-minute extravaganza that featured twenty-five sets as well as numerous exterior locations and over three hundred extras.

Alice Guy Blaché. Private Collection.

Alice Guy Blaché on set. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

Alice Guy Blaché. Courtesy of the Royal Belgian Film Archive.

Matrimony’s Speed Limit (1915). Private Collection. 

A House Divided (Solax, 1913). Private Collection.

Two Little Rangers (Solax, 1912). Private Collection.

In early 1907, Guy resigned her position as head of Gaumont’s film production arm in Paris although she did not end her business relationship with Gaumont. She married Herbert Blaché, another Gaumont company employee. Léon Gaumont sent Herbert to Cleveland to start a Gaumont Chronophone franchise. After nine months the franchise failed, and Gaumont made Herbert manager of his New York studio in Flushing, Queens, which was originally built to produce English language chronophone films. Gaumont had an agreement with the Edison Company and the other members of the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) that his company’s sound as well as silent motion pictures would be distributed as licensed films. In 1909, Edison, who planned his own synchronized sound device called the Kinetophone, began to resist the idea of including the Gaumont company as a licensed MPPC distributor. As a result of Edison’s influence, Gaumont’s many applications for formal membership in the MPPC were rejected. The Flushing plant languished.

In 1910, Guy decided to take advantage of the under-used Flushing plant. She started her own company, Solax, and made silent films using the Gaumont studio. The Solax films were then distributed by Gaumont through George Kleine’s distribution company. By 1911, Solax was making enough money for the Blachés to move into their own large house. Guy built a $100,000 studio plant for Solax in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1912, the same year her second child, Reginald, was born, brother to Simone, born in 1908. Once Gaumont, no longer part of the MPPC monopoly, joined the ranks of the independents, Solax had to negotiate for distribution on a state-by-state basis.

For the two years that it was successful, the Solax Company jump-started the careers of several actors and made stars out of performers such as Darwin Karr and Blanche Cornwall, who starred in a series of melodramas that critiqued the social system, such as A Man’s a Man (1912), The Roads That Lead Home (1913), The Girl in the Armchair (1913), and The Making of an American Citizen (1911) as well as action films like The Detective and His Dog (1912) and the multi-reeler The Pit and the Pendulum (1913). Karr and Cornwall also starred in comedies like A Comedy of Errors (1912), Canned Harmony (1912), His Double (1912), and Burstop Holmes’ Murder Case (1913). But the actors that really brought Guy’s comic genius to life were Marion Swayne and Fraunie Fraunholz. They starred in A House Divided (1913) and Matrimony’s Speed Limit (1913), two typical examples of Alice Guy’s emphasis on marriage as an equal partnership and the reason these two extant films still appeal to audiences today.  Guy also made numerous action films with female characters as heroes, many of them starring Vinnie Burns. Guy first cast Burns when she was an unknown teenager, then trained her to do her own stunts in actions films such as Two Little Rangers (1912), Greater Love Hath No Man (1913), and Guy’s masterpiece at Solax, the three-reeler Dick Whittington and His Cat (1913), for which the director had a real boat detonated. Guy also gave Romaine Fielding his start as an actor; he appeared in numerous Solax films, including Mixed Pets (1911), Across The Mexican Line (1911), and Greater Love Hath No Man. 

The Solax films that stand out today are Guy’s comedies of cross-dressing, such as the extant titles Cupid and the Comet (1911), starring Burns, and What Happened to Officer Henderson (1913), featuring Swayne and Fraunholz. There is also the lost film In the Year 2000 (1912), with Fraunholz and Cornwall, in which male and female gender roles are completely reversed. (Guy originally made the same film for Gaumont in 1906, entitled Les Résultats du féminisme, which survives.) The Solax Company provided a rich growth and learning environment for set designers like Ben Carré and Henri Ménessier, who had followed Alice Guy from Paris. Ménessier, who had designed the sets for Guy’s masterpiece at Gaumont, La Vie du Christ, wrote the photoplay and designed the sets for the Guy-produced film The Sewer (1912), directed by Edward Warren and starring Darwin Karr.

By 1913, the distribution difficulties began to make themselves felt. Solax moved from producing shorts to features the same year, while still producing shorts. However, by the end of 1913, it was clear that the day of the short film was over. Herbert started his own company, Blaché Features, Inc. Blaché Features used the Solax studio and often the same actors. However, Solax continued to work in parallel and some press announcements continued to use the Solax name for both companies for quite some time. Under the Blaché Features banner the couple took turns directing a feature film, or sometimes two, a month, each producing the films the other directed (Slide 74). Some of the films Guy directed include The Shadows of the Moulin Rouge (December 1913) and the following films in 1914: Beneath the Czar, The Dream Woman, The Monster and the Girl, The Woman of Mystery, and The Lure. The script for The Lure was based on the popular Shubert Theatrical production of the play by George Scarborough, and most of the cast from the play appeared in the film (“The Three Arts” 8). It was distributed by the World Corporation, which merged with the Shubert Organization just before the film was released (“World Film and Shuberts Combine” 29).

Blaché Features joined Popular Plays and Players, a loose coalition of film production companies. Under the Popular Plays and Players banner, Guy directed (all in 1915): Heart of a Painted Woman, The Vampire, My Madonna, and What Will People Say?, all starring Olga Petrova. She directed one final film under the Popular Plays and Players banner, The Empress, released on March 11, 1917 (“Features – Current and Coming” 1577), the only film of this period that still survives, though in fragmented form. Popular Plays and Players was absorbed into Metro, according to Billboard in 1917 (65).

Both Guy and Herbert worked as directors for hire in the teens. Guy directed The Ocean Waif for the Golden Eagle/International Film Service, owned by Hearst, which was released on November 2, 1916. On July 1, 1916, Motion Picture News announced that the couple would “shortly open the ‘Greater Blache [sic] Studios’ adjoining the present Solax-Blache [sic] stages and Produce for World and Pathe [sic]” (“Blache [sic] Will Pay $1,000 for Script” 4042). Her surviving feature from this period is the Marcus Loew production The Great Adventure (1918), starring Bessie Love, for which Agnes Christine Johnston wrote the screenplay. The couple separated and Herbert went to Hollywood, but had Guy join him there after she nearly died of the Spanish Influenza. There she worked as his assistant director on The Divorcee (Metro, 1919) starring Ethel Barrymore and two films produced by and starring Alla Nazimova: The Brat (1919) and Stronger than Death (1920). The couple divorced in 1920. Herbert remained in Hollywood and continued to direct features, including The Saphead (1920), starring Buster Keaton, until 1927. He remarried and became a furniture merchant. He died in 1953. In 1922, after handling the bankruptcy auction for her studio plant, Guy chose to return to France, where for the next thirty years she lectured widely on film and wrote magazine fiction and novelizations of film scripts. She never remarried, nor did she make another film. She died in New Jersey in 1968 and is buried in the Catholic cemetery in Mahwah, New Jersey. [Eds. This text was revised by the author in October 2018].

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