Alice Guy: First Lady of Film

This chunky biography by José-Louis Bocquet and Catel Muller (translated by Edward Gauvin) from SelfMadeHero tells the life of Alice Guy, the first female filmmaker. At the end of the 1800s, she was writing, directing, and producing movies. She had her own production company in the US in 1912! And yet few have ever heard of her.

Alice Guy: First Lady of Film covers from 1873 to 1968, the full span of her life, in an immensely welcoming, readable style. She was born in France, spent her childhood in Chile and Switzerland, and was always full of imagination. She became a secretary for the Gaumont camera company, which led her into the earliest days of moving pictures. (The Gaumont Film Company is the world’s oldest company in the industry that still remains, as of the writing of this book.) She even recorded films synchronized to sound recordings in 1900!

Things changed, though, when she married — that’s why she left Europe for America, due to her husband’s career (although they met when he worked for her as a cinematographer). He lost their money in the stock market and took up with one of the actresses, while Alice was making movies about birth control and against child labor. She says at one point, “when I came back to France, I was afraid I’d been forgotten. But, well, I was wrong…. I’m not forgotten. It’s just that, in the eyes of French cinema, I never existed.”

All of this is told in short scenes, clearly dated and located. To help remedy the lack of knowledge about her, this graphic novel also has a detailed timeline covering both her life and the development of cinema, as well as over 50 pages of biographical notes in text, which give more information on the lives of many of the people mentioned in her story. It’s fascinating.