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The Forum: Alice Guy: The first female movie mogul

Alice Guy

01/12/2022 GMT

Alice Guy: The first female movie mogul

BBC World Service - The Forum, Alice Guy: The first female movie mogul

The pioneer of early cinema who was overlooked by history

The young secretary who witnessed the birth of cinema, was one of the first to make a narrative film, and owned and ran her own film studio.

In the late 19th Century, when the motion picture camera was invented and cinema was born, a young French woman called Alice Guy ended up becoming the first ever woman film-maker; rising from being a lowly young secretary to a prolific and pioneering director, producer and entrepreneur. Yet at her death in 1968, she was barely known, most of her thousand or so films had been lost and her crucial role in the history of the film industry was forgotten. In the past few decades, Alice Guy’s reputation has been gradually revived, and today she is recognised as a creative visionary and inspiration to many women film directors.

Joining Rajan Datar to track the career of Alice Guy, or Alice Guy Blaché as she was also known by her married name, is the film scholar, Dr Anthony Slide, the editor of The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché; Dr Alison McMahan, the author of Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema, and the novelised biography WonderShadows; and Caroline Rainette who performed, wrote, and directed, Alice Guy: Mademoiselle Cinema. With the contribution of Pamela Green, the director and producer of Be Natural: the untold story of Alice Guy Blaché.

The reader is Félicité du Jeu. 

Producer: Anne Khazam

(Photo: Alice Guy at her Solax film studios in Fort Lee New Jersey USA, in 1914. Credit: By kind permission of Dr Anthony Slide)

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