Alice Guy Blaché
Subtitle: lost visionary of the cinema
By: Alison McMahan.
Publisher: Continuum
Published: 2002
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 361
Subjects: Guy, Alice, 1873-1968; Motion picture producers and directors -- France -- Biography
Genres: Biography.
Description: "Over a hundred years after she started making films (which was considerably earlier than D. W. Griffith, Mabel Normand, and Lillian Gish began their careers), the life and work of Alice Guy Blache is still shrouded in myth and controversy.".

"Only a fraction of the approximately one thousand films that she directed still exist, and almost half of these have been found very recently. The films are spread out in archives all over the world. Not all of them are available for viewing, even to scholars, and many of them are in desperate need of conservation and preservation.".

"It is widely agreed that she was the first woman filmmaker but there is considerable debate as to whether she made the first ever fiction film. She played a key role in early sound film production, and yet this part of her career is almost always ignored. She is, to this day, the only women ever to have owned and run her own film studio. And yet she made her final film in 1920, at the age of 47, and died in New Jersey in 1968 - unacknowledged, unheralded, almost totally forgotten.".

"Ten years of research has enabled Alison McMahan to piece together the career of this extraordinary woman. What results is the first full-length treatment of Alice Guy Blache's work, the debunking of several long-standing myths about her and, ultimately, the emergence of a feminist figurehead of the filmmaking industry."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [340]-348) and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii; title: DEDICATION xi; title: LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xiii; title: KEY DATES IN THE LIFE OF ALICE GUY BLACHt xvii; title: INTRODUCTION: The Search for Alice Guy Blache xxiii; title: CHAPTER ONE: The Birth of Film Narrative 1; title: CHAPTER TWO: Sound Rewrites Silents: Alice Guy; title: and The Gaumont Chronophone 43; title: CHAPTER THREE: The Growth of Narrative:; title: Alice Guy's Silent Film Production at Gaumont,; title: 1902-1907 78; title: CHAPTER FOUR: Solax: An American Film Company 110; title: CHAPTER FIVE: Feature-length Films and the End of; title: the Solax Company 154; title: CHAPTER SIX: Madame a des envies (Madame has; title: her Cravings): Cross-dressing in the Comedies; title: of Alice Guy 206; title: CONCLUSION 242; title: APPENDIX A: A Standard Identification Process,; title: Or How the Work of Alice Guy has benefitted; title: from increased communication between; title: researchers (by Sabine Lenk) 277; title: Alice Guy in the NFTVA (by Graham Melville) 281; title: APPENDIX B: Extant Films of Alice Guy 288; title: APPENDIX C: Complete Filmography 298; title: Gaumont Films 299; title: Sound Films 320; title: Solax Films 325; title: BIBLIOGRAPHY 340; title: INDEX 349.