Le jardin oublié: La vie et l'oeuvre d'Alice Guy-Blaché

Neglected for a century, the aged woman's cinema treasures, like THE LOST GARDEN in a fairy tale, await rediscovery by a new generation.

This poignant & thoughtful documentary introduces the viewer to Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968), finally being acknowledged as the world's first - and for many years, only - female film director. Through the narration of her granddaughter, Adrienne Blaché-Channing, the viewer is introduced to a charming old lady with a remarkable past.

Present at the very birth of the cinema in Europe, Guy-Blaché, through a series of fortunate circumstances, went on to direct hundreds of two-reelers in France & America from 1896 to 1920. Long before talkies arrived in 1927, she was pioneering the synchronization of motion pictures & sound. Today, tragically, she is virtually forgotten.

Artistic flair is used in seemingly integrating interviewees directly into the ancient films. Using tantalizing selections from her surviving films - and a TV interview she granted before her death - the documentary gives a very good summary of Guy-Blaché's importance to the history of the moving picture.

I've spent much of my life viewing and researching the earliest films, so I certainly appreciate documentaries such as this one, "The Lost Garden: The Life and Cinema of Alice Guy-Blaché," even though it's since been largely superseded by another, "Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché" (2018). It's especially appreciated given that its subject, then more so than now, has oft been neglected by other histories. As one of the earliest filmmakers and the first woman filmmaker in history, Alice Guy deserves the greater attention. In 1995, this documentary was of even more worth due to the dearth of publicly accessible material concerning Guy and her films. Since then, there's been a sampling of her Gaumont films available on home video and streaming, to go along with the availability of some of her American films elsewhere, and, finally, there's a good English-language book on her ("Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema" by Alison McMahan, who worked on both documentaries). It's not a lot, but it's still more recognition than some of her contemporaries have gotten (I'm still waiting for a Brighton collection or something with the existing films of the likes of G.A. Smith and James Williamson, but I digress). In general, early cinema has been receiving more attention from historians over the years. Consequently, although the attention it brings to a still oft neglected figure is appreciated, the errors of "The Lost Garden" have become more glaring.

As the daughter of Alice Guy says of her late mother here, she hated falsehoods. I believe we should extend this intolerance for belittling Guy's accomplishments and her primacy as a filmmaker to attempts to inflate her (or anyone's) role in film history. This is a difficult problem that anyone who has read older film histories has surely encountered numerous times--where, for example, Thomas Edison has been credited as practically the sole inventor of motion pictures and the Lumière brothers that of cinema, Edwin S. Porter that of modern continuity editing, or D.W. Griffith that of the close-up and just about everything else. None of which is true. Some claims made for Guy, including here, could be corrected by simply saying that she was "one of the first," instead of "the first;" anyone making movies before the 20th Century is bound to be among the first in many things. For instance, Guy surely wasn't the first to ever make a story or fiction film or a multi-shot one--she was, rather, among the first to do so.

Much uncertainty relating to Guy's beginnings in film remain--at least, that's the sense I get from reading McMahan's and others' books and essays. Guy claimed that her first film was "La Fée aux Choux" (The Cabbage-Patch Fairy), made in 1896. Over the years, Guy's 1902 two-scene film "Sage-femme de première classe" (Midwife to the Upper Class) has been confused to be this alleged work from 1896. This myth is perpetuated in "The Lost Garden," where they show the 1902 film while they talk about Guy's first film. An earlier single shot-scene version of this cabbage patch scenario is now available in the Gaumont home video series, where it's listed c.1900 (and since otherwise misdated all over the web). To be fair, however, even the "Be Natural" doc simplifies the matter of the c.1900 and 1902 versions being supposed remakes of a hypothetical lost 1896 film, but the entire matter remains cloudy as I've written about already in my reviews for those films.

Some of the other misleading information in "The Lost Garden" is less accounted for. In the section about Guy's move to the United States in 1907, they say that the peephole, single-viewer Kinetoscopes were "all the rage," when, in fact, that technology has been obsolete since 1896 when Edison was selling the Vitascope to project cinema. Early cinema was actually quite international, at least in cross-Atlantic relations; movie systems and the movies themselves from Europe were also available in the U.S. and vise versa. For years, the French studio Pathé dominated both markets (see Richard Abel's books for more on that) and, as reflected by Guy's move, Gaumont also had international concerns. Additionally, in the section on Guy's Solax Company, they say it "would become the largest studio in the United States." That's news to me. So is that filmmakers moved West to Hollywood because of "wartime energy restrictions." I thought it had more to do with the monopoly practices of the Edison Trust.

Perhaps if "The Lost Garden" had provided more for their historians to do besides playing dress up--pretending to be characters from Guy's films--and simply lauding more praise unto her, some of these errors may've been corrected. These experts include McMahan, whose book, as I've already suggested, is more accurate and is, today, the best English-language source on Guy, as well as Anthony Slide, Alan Williams and André Gaudreault, the latter of whom is one of the leaders in research on early cinema whose writing on the "cinema of attractions" is most helpful. He also provides about the only decent film analysis in the program in his mentioning of the merits of Guy's 1906 passion play for Gaumont.

I would've preferred a documentary featuring more insight into Guy's films, as well as one with more-reliable facts, rather than an overview of her life and times, but if "The Lost Garden" has brought more attention to Alice Guy and leads some to be more interested in her films and early cinema in general, then it's easily worthwhile. And, despite any misleads, much of it is an accurate summary of Guy's life and a good introduction to her and her films.

This documentary is about Alice Guy, the FIRST woman director. Starting in clerical work at the French studio, Gaumont, she quickly saw that so much more could be done with film. Previously cinema was limited to static, documentary street-shots. Alice had the vision to create and stage fictional drama. Before there was even the title of "film-maker", she'd begun to develop the language of cinema. Gaumont assigned her to run ALL of its production work. She was the only woman director in the world for 17 years.

Gaumont beat Hollywood by 20 years to matching sound and image, doing MTV-like filmed songs, sound synchronized with images-- color images. This was in the earliest years of the 20th century. Her studio sent Alice Guy to New York with the complicated process. The technology may not have gone over with the public, but she certainly did. She was highly-publicized in the American press and became heavily involved with the early American cinema-- pre-Hollywood.

But since then the woman has been entirely overlooked by the history books. Even at the time, much of her work was attributed to assistants or people who weren't involved at all. This documentary also described her efforts to find old copies or references to her films. Even in advanced years, she was very charming and sharp and alive. Alice Guy died in 1968 at the age of 95.

The documentary was so incredibly cheesy and I really think they screwed up something good. It would have been so much better if they just would have presented the information (and shorter) but instead the director went with his own little thing...zooming in and out on flowers, going from black and white to color, having the mother and daughter talk in a scripted tone. Very weird. Please don't let that Marquise Lepage make a documentary about me!

I learned about Alice Guy-Blaché the same year this documentary was made, but I never heard of the doc until just a week ago, in 2019. It's a well-made, artistic film that includes quite a few charming personal touches, such as dressing some of the featured film scholars in silent-film-style clothing. These idiosyncrasies apparently don't work for everyone, but I thought they were rare and fun. Many of AGB's films were lost--more were rediscovered after this doc was made--but the filmmaker manages to give a decent sampling of her work anyway. She also makes judicious choices of clips from AGB's films to illustrate the story of her life, and that worked well. A number of the shots make you want to seek out the full movie (as of this writing, you can find a few on Netflix).

A few of the claims the film makes are inaccurate, such as the idea that France began projecting films long before the United States. (In reality, projectors appeared in the US in 1895, about the same time as in France, and spread quickly across the country over the next couple of years.) French film company Gaumont was not the first company to do (nonpainted) color or sound films. They developed early color and sound technologies, but they were not the first. I'm not sure if these mistakes came out of French chauvinism (the first commercially successful color-film process--Kinemacolor--was actually British) or just the difficulty of researching this topic; there's been an explosion of silent-film research since this film was made.

I'm also not quite convinced of the claim that AGB was the only female film director for 17 years, which is stated more than once--there were a number of women directing films in the early 1910s, and it wasn't unusual for women not to get credit, so there may have been more. However, it seems to be true that AGB was the first one for some years, even if it wasn't fully 17. I'm a little surprised that the movie didn't take on the controversy about whether AGB was the first narrative film director period, as opposed to the first woman director (it hinges on whether her first film was made at the time she remembered). But I was interested to hear a respected French scholar point out that AGB was probably the first "auteur" in the New Wave sense of the word, since she wrote, produced and directed.

AGB kept a well-stocked pressbook, and this is invaluable in the movie. Her descendants are prominently featured, and the doc also includes parts of interviews that a French TV show fortuitously made with AGB in her later years, so the viewer gets a good sense of what she was like as a person. The historical images are well shot in general. I noticed that the filmmaker managed to get a lovely, clear version of a famous picture of an early Mutoscope parlor, which is usually much more poorly reproduced.

A new documentary about AGB just came out, that I haven't yet seen, so I don't know how it compares to this much older film, but "The Lost Garden" seems like it makes a valuable contribution to film history, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the topic.