First female director still rewriting history

Maryrest Cemetery and Mausoleum in Mahwah is home to one of the world’s most important filmmakers in cinema history—French-American director Alice Guy-Blaché.

Guy-Blaché is not only credited as the world’s first female director, she is also arguably the first director of either gender to direct and produce a narrative film. She held that distinct honor for a decade.

From 1896 to 1920, she directed more than 1,000 short and feature-length films, both silent and talkies. Fictional Hollywood films benefited from the pioneering breakthroughs made by Guy-Blaché, but she was forgotten by the industry she helped create.

“No one was forgotten like Alice, and that has to do, frankly, with her being a woman, and the (film) industry being very male-dominated,” said Tom Meyers, executive director of the Barrymore Film Center, a 260-seat cinema, film museum and archive dedicated to the role Fort Lee, New Jersey, played as the birthplace of the American film industry.

“Right through her death in the 1960s, scholars and film historians were looking to her husband, Herbert Blaché, and not her, as the true builder, owner and director of Solax (Studios) in Fort Lee,” Meyers added.

When Guy-Blaché was buried at Maryrest Cemetery in 1968, her cemetery marker made no reference to the indelible mark she left on the movie-making industry. It only included her name and the year of her birth and death.

But Meyers, a local film historian and expert on Fort Lee’s pre-Hollywood filmmaking history, acquired permission from her surviving relatives and Catholic Cemeteries of the Archdiocese of Newark to install a new grave marker.

On July 1, 2012, Guy-Blaché’s relatives, members of the Fort Lee Film Commission and film enthusiasts dedicated the new cemetery marker on the centennial of the opening of the Solax Studio. It includes her studio logo and the following inscription surrounded by two crosses: “First Woman Motion Picture Director, First Woman Studio Head, President of the Solax Company, Fort Lee, New Jersey.”

Several of Guy-Blaché’s early films were indicative of her deep Catholic roots. According to her autobiography, “The Memoirs of Alice Guy-Blaché,” she was enrolled at Convent of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic boarding school in Viry, France, on the Swiss border. Children prayed the rosary every night and received the punishment of “kneeling arms crossed on an icy corridor” for minor infractions.

But Guy-Blaché also noted the nuns were not cruel, adding, “The superior, a very great lady, wished to make us into strong, accomplished women, capable of conducting themselves correctly in any rank of society.”

Heroines are recurring characters in many of her films, including 1905s “La Esmeralda,” which was the very first film based on Victor Hugo’s classic novel “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.”

Her most ambitious production was “La Vie du Christ” (The Life of Christ) in 1906. Considered one of the first films based on the passion, Guy-Blaché recorded 25 episodes with 300 extras and created the biggest movie sets known at the time in France. She used the James Tissot Bible, which featured 350 vivid watercolors, as storyboards for the film. She also produced several of the earliest known movie special effects, including a superimposition of Christ rising from the Sepulchre and disappearing into heaven.

“I’ve been blown away by her because I think she was an artist, but she didn’t realize it,” said Pamela B. Green, writer, director, producer and editor of the award-winning documentary, “Be Natural,” based on the life and legacy of Guy-Blaché.

Green found movie posters and behind-the-scenes photographs imposed on glass from the “Life of Christ” movie set, which revealed Guy-Blaché directing her talent and production crew amongst costumes, equipment and set decorations—proving that Guy-Blaché did, in fact, direct the film. “Life of Christ” and several other of her films were incorrectly credited to her assistant, Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset, and other male filmmakers.

“It shows how the true origins of cinema were being established by both genders,” Green added.

To read the full version of this story and for links to the documentary and books about Guy-Blaché, go to www.maryrestcemetery.org.

Maxim Almenas is the marketing manager of Catholic Cemeteries of the Archdiocese of Newark.