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Alice Guy-Blache: First Lady of cinema
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There is a saying in North Jersey that before there was Hollywood, there was Fort Lee.
There could also be a saying that before there was Allison Anders, Penny Marshall and Catherine Hardwicke there was Alice Guy-Blache.
While the history of Fort Lee, NJ, as the silent film capital of the world is hardly known outside the metro area, even lesser known is the story of the first female director in motion picture history, who would go on to own and run her own film studio.
Born Alice Guy in Paris in 1873, Blache was the daughter of French bookstore owners who had been living in Chile. In 1894, Blache was hired by French industrialist and inventor Leon Gaumont to work for a still photography company.
When that company failed, Gaumont purchased the remaining inventory and set up a film production company while the industry was still in its infancy. Gaumont started the Gaumont Film Company in 1895, and named Blache as his head of production in 1896.
For 10 years, Blache became a pioneer in developing narrative storytelling during the early years of silent film. Her film The Life of Christ (1906) was one of the first big budget productions of the silent era, featuring 300 extras.
She married Herbert Blache in 1907, and not long after he was named the production manager of Gaumont Film Company's operations in the United States, located in Flushing, NY. In 1910, the Blaches seperated from Gaumont and formed their own production company, Solax , renting space at the underused Gaumont studio in Flushing. Two years later, the Blaches purchased property in Fort Lee, NJ where they built Solax Studios, which would become the largest studio in America before the industry moved to Hollywood.
Over the course of her film career, Blache would direct more than 700 films, in genres ranging from westerns to melodramas to biopics. In the process, she paved the way for women filmmakers to come.
In 1913, Herbert's contract with Gaumont ended. In an effort to focus on writing and directing, Blache named her husband the head of Solax, which lasted three months, when he formed his own company, Blache Features. His company utilized Solax's equipment, crew, stages and actors. Within a year, Blache Features' output surpassed Solax, and by 1914, Solax, as a film production company, was no more. The studios, however, remained, and under the title of Blache Features, Alice Guy-Blache continued to write and direct feature films.
Blache and her husband divorced in 1922, two years after the release of what would be her last film, Tarnished Reputations. She moved back to France, where she would go on to become a film lecturer and novelist.
Blache was all but forgotten during the ensuing decades, until 1955, when she was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government.
Living with her daughter Simone, Blache moved back to New Jersey. She died in a nursing home in Mahwah in 1968, eight years before the publication of her memoirs.
In recent years, her work has been rediscovered by film historians and biographers, such as Alison McMahan, who wrote Alice Guy-Blache: Lost Visionary.
In 2004, the Fort Lee Commission dedicated a marker at the site of the former location of Solax Studios, and this fall they will participate in the Whitney Museum's retrospective on the works of Alice Guy-Blache, which is expected to be the largest retrospective of her work to date.
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