Turner Classic Movies recently ran a documentary: Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache, directed by Pamela Green. It is a story, told rather frenetically, of one of the first female film directors, who started in France and moved with her husband to America, where she had her own studio in Fort Lee, N.J. and a banner hung up there for her actors: Be Natural. Her directing career ran from 1896 to 1920, she lost her studio, Solax, because of her husband's bad investments and a world war, returned to France and never directed again, for a number of reasons, mainly the more rigorous male hierarchy that studios in both France and America had become. She continued to fight for the credits she deserved (none of her films has a credited director) until her death in 1968 at the age of 94.
Pamela Green tracked down what she could of Guy-Blache's films (only 14% of silent films survive in their original format, another 11% survive in other formats of lesser quality) and Turner showed several of them in conjunction with Green's documentary. the best of which was The Ocean Waif from 1916, a film with "the wind in the trees" considerably influenced by D. W. Griffith (who in not mentioned in Green's documentary and who may have been as influenced by Guy-Blache as she was by him), about a girl brutalized by her foster father and rescued by a writer living nearby. It's a tragic melodrama with a wonderfully subtle performance by Doris Kenyon. Guy-Blache was equally adept at comedy, as in Canned Harmony of 1911, where Billy Quirk plays a suitor of a girl whose father will only allow her to marry a musician so he dons a wig (one doesn't hear the term "long-hair music" to refer to classical music too much any more) and "plays" the violin to a recording (this is also a reference to the synchronized movies and records that Guy-Blanche experimented with at Pathe in France before she moved to America).
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