The inspiring story of Alice Guy, the first female movie director in
film history, chronicles her contribution to the birth of cinema in
France in the late 19th century
In 1895 the Lumière brothers invented the cinematograph. Less than a
year later, 23-year-old Alice Guy, the first female filmmaker in cinema
history, made The Cabbage Fairy, a 60-second movie, for Léon Gaumont,
and would go on to direct more than 300 films before 1922. Her life is a
shadow history of early cinema, the chronicle of an art form coming into
its own. A free and independent woman who rubbed shoulders with masters
such as Georges Méliès and the Lumières, she was the first to define the
professions of screenwriter and producer. She directed the first
feminist satire, then the first sword-and-sandal epic, before crossing
the Atlantic in 1907 to the United States and becoming the first woman
to found her own production company. Guy died in 1969, excluded from the
annals of film history. In 2011 Martin Scorsese honored this cinematic
visionary, "forgotten by the industry she had helped create," describing
her as "a filmmaker of rare sensitivity, with a remarkable poetic eye
and an extraordinary feel for locations." The same can be said of Catel
and Bocquet's luminous account of her life.
