CineWomen: Alice Guy-Blaché makes women’s film history
Plus ‘The World to Come’ by Mona Fastvold, ‘Moxie’ by Amy Poehler, and ‘Stray’ by Elizabeth Lo
I started CineWomen with a film by a man: Women Make Film from director Mark Cousins. That fourteen-part exploration of filmmaking has now arrived on Criterion Channel in a package that includes a selection of movies highlighted in the series. What better way for cineastes to celebrate Women’s History Month than to dive into this masterclass.
Meanwhile, I caught up in March with Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, a 2018 documentary by Pamela B. Green about the world’s first female filmmaker, how she pioneered an art form and an industry, and reckoning with a business that either forgot or actively erased her.
Narrated by Jodie Foster, the film is constructed like a mystery, with Green, mortified that she’d never heard Guy-Blaché, setting out to piece together the remnants of the filmmaker’s legacy from family heirlooms, lost interviews, and of course her movies.
A secretary at Gaumont, Guy-Blaché attended the first public demonstration of the Lumiere brothers’ film projection system in 1895. She immediately recognized the narrative potential of the form and asked if she could make movies of her own. Her boss, Léon Gaumont, said sure, as long as she didn’t fall behind on the mail.
Guy-Blaché wrote, directed, or produced an estimated thousand films at the very birth of cinema. She was among the first to introduce storytelling to motion pictures with The Cabbage Fairy, as well as to implement techniques such as the closeup, color tinting, and synchronized sound, influencing Eistenstein and Hitchcock.
In a career spanning two decades on both sides of the Atlantic — she built and ran her own film studio in the U.S. — Guy-Blaché made comedies and dramas, explored the life of Christ and contemporary feminism, and directed the earliest known film with an all-Black cast.
You can watch all of this unfold by viewing a collection of Guy-Blaché’s films (see below), but Be Natural provides valuable context to her work, thus this bonus recommendation!
Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018), directed by Pamela B. Green (Kanopy)
The Gaumont films of Alice Guy-Blaché
To watch the early films of Alice Guy-Blaché — which are among the earliest films ever made — is to witness the invention of cinema.
She made her first movie the year after the Lumiere brothers introduced their motion picture projection system to the world, and quickly graduated from demonstration reels of subjects like fishermen and serpentine dancers to little narrative vignettes, including one of her signature shorts, The Cabbage-Patch Fairy.
It is astounding to watch her experiment with the technology, pioneering techniques that still enchant us today. That change-of-clothes trick that’s all the rage on TikTok? AGB was doing that back in ’98. Eighteen ninety-eight. Running film backward, a la Tenet? She did that in 1900.
What started with a static camera capturing silent action that takes place in a box, as in the theater, evolved into cuts to scenes that take place somewhere else entirely; the rotation of the camera to pan the landscape; and a very early version of synchronized sound.
She made funny little comedies about the cravings of a pregnant woman and a drunk who gets sewn up in a mattress, and epic dramas based on Faust and Mephistopheles and The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ. She made a biting satire in which women behave like men and vice versa and a melodrama adventure about a boy who avenges his father’s death and a freaking war movie.
And she put women at the center of her films as comedic heroines and vile villains.
Guy-Blaché’s career spanned two distinct chapters: about a decade making films at Gaumont in France, then another half decade or so running her own studio, Solax, in the United States.
I watched about three-and-a-half hours of her Gaumont stuff that’s part of a three-disc box set dedicated to the studio’s early years and available on Kanopy. There are also two volumes dedicated entirely to Guy-Blaché’s oeuvre — one for the Gaumont years and one for the Solax years. All of these are from Kino Lorber.
I’ll be curious to check out Guy-Blaché’s Solax catalog at some point in the future — apparently with the creative freedom of running her own studio, she started exploring long-form filmmaking.
In the meantime, I will continue to marvel at her contribution to the birth of cinema through her films at Gaumont.
Gaumont Treasures 1897–1907, Part 1 (1897–1907), directed by Alice Guy-Blaché (Kanopy)
‘The World to Come’
Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Ammonite. And now The World to Come.
The period lesbian romance that thrusts together two women in isolation has become so ubiquitous that SNL made a sketch about it.
In director Mona Fastvold’s version, the clandestine lovers are Abigail (Katherine Waterston) and Tallie (Vanessa Kirby), farmwives in mid-nineteenth-century upstate New York.
Abigail is our narrator, via the log her husband Dyer (Casey Affleck) has asked her to keep, which veers from updates about chores and weather to intimate confessions about her attraction — platonically, she probably thinks, until not — to her new neighbor. Smart and curious about the world beyond her valley, buttoned-up and aggrieved over the loss of her young daughter to diphtheria, Abigail has withdrawn from her marriage but is drawn to the free-spirited Tallie, whose devout husband Finney (Christopher Abbott) cannot contain her.
Based on a short story by Jim Shepard, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ron Hansen (the novelist behind The Assassination of Jesse James by the Cowad Robert Ford), The World to Come retains a poetic voice through Abigail’s voiceover as well as Fastvold’s aesthetic rooted in the natural world and the four seasons. Filmed on 16mm in Romania, using only the natural light of day, fire and oil lamps, the imagery by Fastvold and cinematographer André Chemetoff captures both the exquisite beauty and the miserable isolation of the frontier.
Even more rugged terrain are the volcanic personalities — placid on the surface, roiling underneath — and dynamic personalities that Fastvold navigates: Abigail’s reserve belying her passion; Dyer’s despondency his devotion; Tallie’s spirit her entrapment; and Finney’s zealotry his misogynistic rage.
The World to Come is a rapturous, inevitably tragic, love story that suggests resolution only in its titular eschatological phrase.
The World to Come (2020), directed by Mona Fastvold (digital)
‘Moxie’
Superlatives are a staple of high school movies — and high school itself. Cutest couple. Class clown. Most likely to succeed.
Innocent fun, right? Sure, until you win “most obedient” or “best rack” or inspire a new category around the c-word.
Such a list sparks that obedient girl Vivian (Hadley Robinson) in Amy Poehler’s Moxie — a throwback coming-of-ager for the #MeToo era in which the young women of Rockport High School rally around the titular zine by an anonymous author (spoiler alert: it’s Vivian) to demand equality and an end to harassment.
At the center of their complaints is Mitchell (Patrick Schwarzenegger — yes, that, Schwarzenegger) — star of the school’s losing football team who hogs an athletic award that rightfully should have gone to the star of the winning women’s soccer team, and who targets the new girl Lucy (Alycia Pascual-Peña), who refuses to put up with the misogyny everyone else at the school seems to have been indoctrinated in.
Lucy’s outspokenness and Vivian’s anonymity contrast with resistance from Vivian’s bestie Claudia (Lauren Tsai) who, under pressure from her immigrant parents, feels she has more to lose by participating in stunts like a tank-top protest. Yet they all push back, each in her own way, in a demonstration of how all have different roles to play in social justice movements.
Poehler co-stars as Vivian’s mom, whose history with the riot grrrl punk movement inspires her daughter — an homage that plays out with the casting of the punk-pop girl group the Linda Lindas as themselves.
Based on the novel by Jennifer Mathieu, Moxie is fun and inspiring and all too relevant.
Moxie (2021), directed by Amy Poehler (Netflix)
‘Stray’
Like Kedi before it, Elizabeth Lo’s Stray explores the streets of Istanbul, Turkey, though the animals who wander them, in this case, dogs.
Meet the independent Zeytin, nurturing Nazar, and puppy Kartal — canines who have the run of the city because it’s illegal to euthanize or hold them captive.
Lo brings her camera close up and down to their level so that we experience the city through their eyes. Yet humanity emerges, as their stories are tied up with those of the people they encounter — threads of intimate conversations, understood to the director only later when translated, between strangers never seen again; and recurring characters who turn out to be strays themselves, Syrian refugees living on the streets as well.
These dogs’ lives are scrappy, sometimes ugly, but also — elevated by Lo’s quotes of the dog-obsessed Greek philosopher Diogenes — charismatic and noble.
Stray (2020), directed by Elizabeth Lo (digital)
