A fairytale derivation of the gender difference goes like this: Girls come from roses, boys from cabbages.
There are cultures where the stork brings the children, and then there are those where they grow in vegetables.
The French filmmaker Alice Guy knew the story of vegetables and adapted it to a small film in the spring of 1896: “La Fée aux Choux”, in German “The Fairy of Cabbage”, is now considered the first feature film in history.
It was a good minute long, is missing, is sometimes mistaken for a remake from 1902 (“Sage-femme de première classe”, again directed by Alice Guy), but despite the incomplete sources, an assertion can be made that is increasing today Gaining weight: the beginnings of the cinema have not been adequately told. The common version that the Lumière brothers invented the cinematograph and the documentary moving image, the competitor Méliès then the spectacle cinema, has to be supplemented. In this new constellation, Alice Guy is either the founder of narrative cinema or, more precisely: "the first great comic director".
This is what you hear in Pamela B. Green's film "Be Natural - The Film Pioneer Alice Guy-Blaché". Alice Guy married the cameraman Herbert Blaché in 1907, who in a way was her undoing, but she carried the double name all her life, and so she is now canonized. But at the end of the 19th century when she was a stenographer at Gaumont, her name was Alice Guy. And she did something that superiors did not welcome among employees at the time: she exceeded her area of responsibility. How it came about that she was active as a filmmaker can no longer be reconstructed in detail, but it definitely had to do with her own initiative. Gaumont was a media group in the making, the devices were there because the company was working intensively on sound-image couplings at the time, i.e. basically on pre-forms for the sound film,which only became commonplace more than thirty years later.
Films were very short in the beginning; the most varied of formats circulated. Alice Guy made mostly 60mm films (or more precisely: 58mm), and she was instrumental in helping early cinema develop a narrative language. “The fairy of the cabbages” is still completely unselfconscious, the picture is taken from the front, the trick is the trick or special effect that behind the large cabbages there was space for a baby, which the fairy pulled out with aplomb. The first years of cinema were marked by the enthusiasm that almost always goes hand in hand with new media at the beginning. It is no coincidence that one of the comparisons made in “Be Natural” is aimed at the disruptions that determine everyday life almost as a matter of course: In this view, Alice Guy-Blaché was the “Steve Jobs of her time”.
There is not enough time in “Be Natural” for a detailed reconstruction of this period; it is better to consult Alice McMahan's book, which served as a model: “Alice Guy-Blaché.
Lost Visionary of Cinema “is now almost twenty years old.
The number of editions has continued to improve in these years.
Old nitrate-based films are found and reconstructed again and again, and more attention is now also being paid to questions of classification.
For a long time, the historiography of cinema was shaped by standard works from the years after the Second World War, when the critical viewing and collecting of film treasures was only just beginning and often half-knowledge shaped the representation.
Even beyond the early “cinema of attractions”
The long almost unchallenged film history of Georges Sadoul led the Jesus story “La Vie du Christ” from 1906 under the name of an employee of Alice Guy. Based on the motifs of the Tissot Bible, which was very widespread at the time, she made a film of the life of Jesus, which on the one hand wanted to score with the realism of the (painted) landscapes of the Holy Land, on the other hand it followed the “intuitions” of Jacques Joseph Tissot. In any case, Alice Guy turned out to be a filmmaker who was well beyond the very early "cinema of attractions" (largely unrelated individual ideas). In 1906 "Les Résultats du féminisme" was created, from which it is said in "Be Natural" that Sergej Eisenstein was inspired by it. This film title is of course suggestive for today's reading.And there is actually a “feminist” self-interpretation by Alice Guy-Blaché, in which she simply insists that the cinema does not pose tasks in any of its areas that cannot also be fulfilled by women.