Around 1913, filmmaker Alice Guy Blaché. Like other pioneering women in film, she was discovered, ignored, and rediscovered. © Apeda Studio New York, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Even before women had the right to vote, Brach expressed women's drives, desires, and self-determination through her actions and films.
In 1910, two years after giving birth to her daughter, Alice Brach founded her own film production company. She was so successful that in 1912, the year she gave birth to her son, Brach established his own state-of-the-art studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, then a bustling film city.
In 1912, the business magazine Movie World wrote: "About 16 or 17 years ago, she pioneered the company's display of small plays on screen".
"I've always stressed to my assistant directors that success only comes to those who give the public what they want, and something else. This 'other thing' I call our personality. ”
Brach wrote of her life: "It was a failure; Is it a success? I do not know. ”
In 1911, The Moving Picture News wrote that Alice Guy Blaché, the first female filmmaker in history, was "a good example of what a woman can do if she is given a fair chance in life."
By the time of publication, Brach had started a successful film company in the United States and announced that she would open a new studio in New Jersey. She quickly built that studio and contributed to her success. Cinema is Brachi's passion – she calls her Prince Charming – and it has carried her across continents and centuries, and her life has been shaped both by great achievements and by some of the same struggles that female filmmakers face today.
She is aware of her uniqueness.
In 1912, Brach told The New York Clipper, a weekly entertainment magazine, "I've made some of the biggest work a studio has ever produced." ”
She produced — directing, producing, or executive producing (often in three roles) — about 1,000 films, many of them shorts, by the standard of the time.
She later left the industry when her life was ruined by personal and professional disappointment, and then spent years trying to earn her place in the history she helped create.
Like other pioneering women in the development of cinema, Brach was discovered, somehow ignored, and rediscovered. Only now, largely because feminist film scholars are writing women back into history, has her position firmer.
Brac began working in film at the age of 22 and worked as a secretary in Paris for Léon Gaumont, the inventor who began making movie cameras. To show the cameras to customers, the company produced short films that Brach thought could be done better.
"I've read a lot of books," she wrote in The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché, posthumously published in 1976 by historian Anthony Slide. She also did some "amateur theater".
Brach (center) in a scene from Sage-Femme de Première Classe (The Midwife First Class) in 1902. The film tells the story of a young couple who go to buy a baby. (Brach plays her husband.) ）© Photograph Collections of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
She asked Gaumont if she could film a few scenes.
Decades later, Brach recalled in a French television interview: "It seemed like a stupid, girly thing," Gaumont told her, "but you can try it if you want." But there is one condition: it cannot affect your office work. ”
In 1896, with a photographer, an actress and a painted background, she shot her first film, La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy). It's a one-minute pantomime that shows a young woman smiling with flowers hanging from her chest and plucking a screaming naked baby from a cabbage field made of wood. Some historians believe that Bracci's first work was her 1902 remake of Sage-Femme de Première Classe, which tells the story of a young couple who go to buy a baby. (Brach plays her husband.) ）
Gaumont soon made Brach head of film production at his company, where she produced and executive produced hundreds of films, helped build an organized studio system long before Hollywood became a corporatized city, and produced artistic luminaries like Louis Feuillade. When she moved to the United States and restarted her film career, her experience working at Gaumont was touted in the profile. In 1912, the business magazine The Movie Picture World wrote, "About 16 or 17 years ago, she pioneered the company's display of small plays on screen."
Alice Ida Antoinette Guy was born on July 1, 1873, in Saint-Mande, on the eastern edge of Paris. Her parents, Marie and Émile Guy, are French but live in Chile and her father is a bookseller. Mary returned to France for Alice's birth and left the child to her grandmother. Three years later, Mary returned to pick up Alice and they sailed to Chile. In her memoirs, she recalled that while passing through the Strait of Magellan near the southern tip of Chile, she fantasized about fairies and beasts on an ice wall — a prelude to her early whimsical screen reverie.
Various tragedies ensued in Chile and the family eventually returned to France, but over time, the family disintegrated, leaving only Alice to support her mother.
Much of Alice's early experiences seem to be preparing for her film life, which is full of adventure, scarcity, and moments of tenacity. In her first secretary position, she recalls, in an all-male factory, she bravely stood up to sexual harassers.
"My youth, my inexperience, my gender, all of this is against me," Brach wrote of her entry into filmmaking. But she worked hard, persevered, and would prove fruitful.
In 1894, she persuaded Gaumont, then a deputy at a photography company, to hire her. Soon after, Gaumont set up his own company, and Brach became a pioneer, making films that were hand-colored and some used groundbreaking sound systems that synchronized visual effects with pre-recorded wax tubes. In one clip, Brach can be seen starting the gramophone while she directs the cast and crew. Among her Gaumont films is La Femme Collante (Sticky Woman), a hilarious film about a maid with a sticky tongue; There's also Le Matelas Alcoolique, a hilarious movie about a drunk being sewn into a mattress and transported to the user.
In 1907, she married Herbert Blaché, another Gaumont employee, and resigned as head of film production to accompany him to the United States, where he was sent to promote Gaumont's simultaneous sound film system. The work failed. But in 1910, two years after giving birth to her daughter Simone, Alice Brachi founded the Solax company and began making her own films. She was so successful that in 1912 — the year she gave birth to their son, Reginald, — Brach established her state-of-the-art studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, then a bustling film town.
She maintains a superhuman pace at Solax. She would hop on a car or ride to scout locations, including orphanages, opium houses, night courts and Sing Sing prisons, but she declined invitations to witness the executions. She supervised other directors and assistants, oversaw a troupe of adult and child actors, and kept a group of animal performers in captivity, including mice, lions, leopards, and a 600-pound tiger named the princess. On one wall in her studio, she hung a sign that read, "Be Natural."
Brach (second from right) directed the 1915 film My Madonna. © Photograph Collections of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Her interest in realism and acting dovetails with what her biographer, Alison McMahan, calls Brach's greatest achievement. McMahan said in a telephone interview that her film "focuses on the psychological perspective of the central character."
Brach told The Clipper in 1912: "I have always stressed to my assistant directors that success comes only to those who give the public what they want, and something else. This 'something else' I call our personality. ”
Brach expanded her repertoire of Sorax with cowboy films, such as "Two Little Rangers," which featured a pair of gun-wielding heroines, one of whom was a curly-haired girl who carried a villain off a cliff. Whether it's feminism by design or not, the film is feminism by default. Brach wondered if women were ready to vote, but in her actions and films, she expressed women's drives, desires, and the right to self-determination.
At Solax, she successfully transitioned into feature filmmaking, creating longer, more complex narrative themes that were popular though they also required higher production costs and longer lead times. However, despite Brac's creative transition to feature films, she did not weather the seismic changes affecting the fast-growing film industry, including monopolistic distribution. By 1914, she and Herbert Brach joined another enterprise, both of which worked as directors.
The final chapter of Bracci's filmmaking career was marked by setbacks and disappointments in her new career with her husband and as a hired director. She made The Ocean Waif, a touching romance about an abused young woman and writer that gave (almost) equal weight to both.
Other films followed, but as she directed the critically acclaimed Her Great Adventure, Brach was battling her health, financial difficulties, broken marriages and ongoing industry turmoil. She refused to direct the film "Tarzan." In 1922, the Sorax studio was auctioned, and the divorced Brach returned to France with his two children.
In France, she tried to find a film job, but was unsuccessful. It is not clear why she did not succeed, although by the 1920s cinema had become a big business and was no longer as welcoming as it used to be for women who wanted to make their own films. She sold her books, paintings and other possessions and began writing articles and children's stories.
She and her daughter, who worked for the U.S. Foreign Office, spent the final years of World War II in Switzerland, where Brac began writing his memoirs. She also tried to find her films, but most could not be found and are thought to have been lost. But she persevered, giving interviews and garnering some recognition for her pioneering role in the film industry for a while.
Brach wrote of her life: "It was a failure; Is it a success? I do not know. She died on March 24, 1968, in a nursing home in New Jersey. He was 94 years old.
In 2012, the Fort Lee Film Commission installed a new tombstone for Brach. The original piece only noted her name and her birth and death dates. The new memorial reads: Alice Guy Brach is "the first female film director," "the first female studio director," and "president of Fort Lee Solax, New Jersey."
The monument is also decorated with the logo of the company Solax: an image of the sun rising on a new day. (End)
原文：Overlooked No More: Alice Guy Blaché, the World’s First Female Filmmaker
Written by Manohla Dargis
Published: nytimes.com
Translated by Lin Xi