José-Louis Bocquet

A solid dramatization of the life of a woman who deserves to be better known: cinema's first female director, Alice Guy-Blaché. It's a thick graphic novel, but the chapters are short and filled with Guy's vibrant personality. And her career crosses paths with icons like Gustave Eiffel, the Lumière brothers, and Charlie Chaplin.

The seventy -- that's 70, 70, 70, SEVENTY, 70, 70, 70 -- pages of end matter, giving a timeline of the history of cinema and Guy's life as well as mini bios for every significant person in her life, gets to be a bit much with it's teeny-tiny print, but they do fill in some holes that the main story breezes by. But they take soooooo much longer to read that the 323 pages that proceed them.… (more)

A well-done graphic novel providing a decent biography of Alice Guy, a true pioneer in the early days of filmmaking. It’s mind-boggling to think that despite her accomplishments and status during her day, she was nearly forgotten because she was a woman, and because of a ridiculously poor historical account from Georges Sadoul in 1947. It wasn’t until the 1950’s, and after efforts on her own part, that her story was told and appreciated.

The book tells the story of her life and also provides great context, with the technical innovations from rival inventors, the nascent filmmaking industry she became a part of, and what it meant to be a woman dealing with the misogynistic attitudes in the workplace. Much of Guy’s output consisted of very short “photoscenes,” just a minute or two long, sadly of which the vast majority have not survived. Make no mistake, however, she was an innovator in many ways:

- She told one of the very first narrative films with The Cabbage Patch Fairy (originally 1896, remade 1900), at a time when most short films were of things like trains pulling into stations. She knew films should tell a story.

- From the beginning, she was a believer in talkies, using an early invention called the chronophone to synchronize audio and video (1902).

- She invented the sword and sandal epic with The Birth, Life, and Death of Christ (1906).

- She made the early feminist film that reversed gender roles in a provocative way in The Consequences of Feminism (1906).

- With the photoscene the ballet Le Bal des Capulets at the start of Charles Gounod's opera Roméo et Juliette (1907), she produced the very first behind-the-scenes “making of” sequence in film history.

- She pioneered better acting in an era beset with over-emoting and exaggerated gestures more appropriate to the stage with her mantra, “Be Natural” at her Solax film studio in New Jersey (1912).

- With A Fool and His Money (1912), hers was the first major U.S. film production company to hire an African American in a leading role, James Russell, instead of using white actors in blackface. It was also an all-black cast because the white actors originally conceived for the other roles refused to work alongside him.

- She made the progressive film Shall the Parents Decide (1916), now lost, meant to be seen at the clinic opening of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger.

The book also describes her personal life, dispelling rumored romances over the years (including one with her boss, Léon Gaumont), and telling of her marriage to Herbert and his subsequent adultery with the lead actress in their productions, Catherine Culvert. We also get a glimpse into the personalities in her office, and her tutorship of Louis Feuillade, who later became very successful in his own right (Fantomas, Irma Vep, Judex).

The final sections that outline a timeline as well as short biographies of the people in Alice Guy’s life goes beyond Wikipedia-like descriptions. How her father Émile Guy’s life was reflected in the characters in her films in the 1910’s was fascinating, as was the life of Frédéric Dillaye, an early believer in then-unpopular view that photography being an art form, but who tragically lost his wife in a fire resulting from the mishandling of the highly flammable nitrate film stock in those days that killed 120. Also notable was the account of the Lumiere brothers whose innovation of the cinématographe surpassed Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope (which was a solo viewing experience), and led to the first public screening in history in 1895. The extent of Gustave Eiffel’s architecture, his friendship with Alice Guy, and the slanderous trial he had to endure stands out, as does a ruined and disillusioned Georges Mélies burning his entire film archive in 1923, a terrible loss. There are many others.

Overall, there is probably a limit to how academic a graphic novel can be, but it certainly makes this very worthy subject approachable, and it was educational to me. Catel & Bocquet did fine work here.… (more)

graphic nonfiction/biography, history - first female director when moving pictures were still becoming a thing

graphic storytelling is effective, but the middle part is boring AF. I struggled to get to p. 210, and still had half a book to go. Apparently she was a stenographer for a French photography office that then diverged into moving pictures, among many other competing firms (patent infringement lawsuits ensued). I suppose she probably eventually got to do some more directing/producing as the new entertainment artform took shape, but in the meantime it is pages and pages of people talking about the beginning of the industry--possibly interesting if you are into that, but not very engaging as a graphic biography, with little happening in Alice's life to speak of, and her contributions being noteworthy but relatively minimal in terms of the action of the book.

there is considerable backmatter--biographies of various people of the industry in that era, it looks like, but I didn't care enough to read the tiny print.… (more)