Be Natural original story of Alice Guy Blaché by herself with Bessie Love
You could spend hours searching for the first female director and studio
owner somewhere between essentials Hugh Grant and Jake Gyllenhaal in
something that calls itself
The New Biographical Dictionary of Film
and never come across the name Alice Guy. So I’m not surprised I’d
never heard of her. My shadow-life film education has always been
informal and haphazard, growing in the cracks between classes and
deadlines, events and obligations (and sometimes instead of them), with
all the focused appetite and short abandonment of a yellow lab. It was
only a year ago that I sought a verbal Virgil to guide me through the
eleven circles of
The American Cinema, and we never quite made it
to the 19th century. At the moment, the only thing I’ve read about
Alice Guy is the article that introduced me to her name—and that of
Léonce Perret—
Dave Kehr’s
NYT essay
on the 7-disc Gaumont set (abridged to 3 for us Region 1 philistines)
about the early days of the French studio, likely the oldest still in
operation.
I'm not a total neophyte—I'm familiar with Dickson and Heise and Reynaud
and George Albert Smith, not to mention Lumière and Méliès—but 64
shorts in chronological order is somewhat more helpfully curated than
Youtube. Going through the Gaumont discs is a trail-blazing journey from
19th century action flicks, by which I mean those pre-narrative
actualities about the basic actions of everyday life (like “The Kiss”
and “Fencing”) to early 1900s dramatic narrative shorts. It’s not just a
filmmaker growing. It’s cinema growing >>>>.http://bnowalk.blogspot.com.es/2012/07/summer-of-silents-2-real-3d-of-alice-guy.html
![NATURAL] Alice Guy-Blaché transformed the art of screenacting for all time.](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZmdIvdnl9R-_ykWLNc1mSSQJ4Ig_Yc3w907PomiITAlqumthtx4WJUdcWMNLB0P0FC27_jsc55sgyxRIl9vc97uihu0MCuw0THH7Igl1W05ORTxa-NsOzE_e-nF6hRba_E5tBlGBvzMc/s1600-h/aaaa-bessie-love-5.jpg){kind=link}