Alice Guy: First Lady of Fil by Catel Muller and Jose-Louis Bocquet
Aside from screen roles, women were given limited options in the movie industry throughout the world—at least after the introduction of sound and the consolidation of the Hollywood studios. However, things were different in the early 20th century when filmmaking was new and open to all comers, including minorities such as Jews and women, the discriminated-against half of the world’s population.
French filmmaker Alice Guy was especially notable among women in the early movie industry. She directed her first film in 1896 and was instrumental in establishing the Gaumont Studio before moving to the U.S. in 1907.
Graphic novelists Catel Muller and Jose-Louis Bocquet tell her story in black and white pictures, frame by frame. Their First Lady of Film is also a handy resource on early film history with biographies of her contemporaries and collaborators and a chronology that begins in 1822 with “the first permanent photograph” (a French invention) through 1976 (the belated publication of Guy’s memoir). Along the way she directed hundreds of pictures, most of them short. She made her final movie in 1920 and was written out of the early history of cinema by men eager to claim the honors for themselves. She died in 1968, largely unacknowledged.
