Cinédanse: Alice Guy, the woman on the camera - Toutlaculture

January 05, 2022 |By Nicolas Villodre

The documentary currently programmed by the cultural channel, Alice Guy, the unknown of the 7th art, allows us to evoke creativity in the field of the cinedanse of the first woman screenwriter, filmmaker and film producer.

Alouettes mirror

Alice Guy (1873-1968), who had just been trained at the Sténo-Dactylo (a profession then reserved ... for men), recalls the hesitation of Léon Gaumont (1864-1946), the new director of the Comptoir deThe photography of Félix Richard, during his job interview in 1894: "You are young.- It will pass me!The young woman was initiated and accumulated the function of secretary and, on her initiative, that of director of demos intended to promote the biographer recently acquired by the company Gaumont, a 58 mm camera designed by Georges Demenÿ, the former assistant'Étienne-Jules Marey, brother of Paul (poet and close friend of Rimbaud), moreover, French reformer of rhythmic dance and master to think of Irene Popard.

If she is not the director of the first fictional film with La Fée aux Choux which, according to her, dates from 1896, since the watering sprinkled with Louis Lumière had been shot the preceding year, Alice Guy innovated in goodsome domains.From 1897 she directed the productions of the Studio Elgé (L.G., like Léon Gaumont), 14 rue des Alouettes, which has a battery of electrical projectors allowing to turn whatever sunshine then, in 1902, used the process of the sound film of chronophone.Alice Guy turns a phonoscène in the studios of the Buttes-Chaumont (1907) attests.This film, first making of history, self-referential and advertising at the same time, is also a cinema-ballet.According to the GaumontPathives site, the troop wears the costumes of Roméo and Juliette there.

Be Natural

Alice Guy devoted a certain number of coilks to the Dranem and Mayol music hall numbers, to Lina Grorard and Bob Walter's serpentine dances, distinguished from those of Loïe Fuller.Its operator Anatole Thiberville fixed it in the middle of the Andalusian in Granada in 1905 and also captured Spanish and gypsy dances.In 2011, during a program at the Musée d'Orsay which was devoted to the filmmaker, we appreciated among others a pantomime, dance of the seasons (1900), Les Fredaines de Pierrette (1900), color film with a transvestite woman inPierrot embracing Colombine, La Malagueña y El Torero (1905), also colored with stencil and Saharet Bolero (1905).

Responsible with Herbert Blaché to represent the Gaumont in America, Alice married her colleague and created in 1910 her own company, the Solax, in Fort Lee, in New Jersey, who was then the Mecca of the 7th Art with budding majors like theFox, Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Universal.Alice produced and produced alone then with her husband (at the end of the contract binding him to Léon Gaumont) a long series of fiction films, genres in vogue like the western, but also a singular work that deserves to be noted: aFool and His Money (1912), entirely interpreted by black actors, this seven years before the beginnings of Oscar Micheaux.As for the direction of actors, the instructions displayed in the studio was clear: "Be natural".That's all she asked comedians from the theater, so overplaying.Be Natural was his trademark.

Visual: Alice Guy some time before the invention of the cinematograph.White Alice-Guy Fund Peeters.