New York Times: ‘Be Natural’ Review: Rescuing Alice Guy Blaché, a Film Pioneer, From Oblivion

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché

Directed by Pamela B. Green

Documentary 1h 43m

By A.O. Scott

At the beginning of Pamela B. Green’s lively and informative new documentary, a bevy of movie people — directors, actors, scholars and others — are asked if they know anything about Alice Guy Blaché, who is the subject of the film. A few of them do (Ava DuVernay, for one), but most admit that they have no clue. Viewers who are similarly ignorant shouldn’t feel bad, and in the best pedagogical spirit Green turns blank looks and sheepishly shrugged shoulders into a teaching moment. “Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché” seeks both to help rescue Guy Blaché from oblivion and to explain how she got there in the first place.

Alice Guy was born into a bourgeois French family in 1873. An interview conducted more than 90 years later reveals a woman very much of her era and class, with crisp diction, faultless grammar and a mildly ironical way of talking about even painful and contentious matters. Trained in stenography, Alice was hired, at 22, as an assistant to Léon Gaumont, who would soon become one of the founders of the French film industry.

Guy (who married the British cameraman Herbert Blaché in 1907) merits that description as much as her boss. Often referred to as a pioneer — one of a handful of important women filmmakers active in cinema’s earliest days — she was more than that. Present at an early, private Paris showing of one of Louis and Auguste Lumière’s first shorts, Guy was among the first to explore the storytelling potential of the new medium. At the Gaumont studio, where she worked until 1906, she directed hundreds of fantasies, comedies, melodramas and historical films. After moving to the United States, she set up her own company, Solax Studios, continuing her prolific output in the burgeoning proto-Hollywood of Fort Lee, N.J.

She was, in sum, a studio chief as well as a director and producer — a key figure in the emergence of two major national cinemas. The recovery of this reputation is central to Green’s project, and she builds on the work of historians and archivists, including Guy Blaché’s biographer, Alison McMahan. “Be Natural” is its own making-of documentary, following Green’s gumshoe efforts to track down letters and ledgers, artifacts and descendants. She enlists a specialist in facial recognition to determine whether a woman in an ancient moving picture is indeed Guy Blaché. She zigzags across Los Angeles in search of a lab that will digitize antique videotapes. She details her own cross-country and trans-Atlantic peregrinations as well as those undertaken by her heroine more than a century earlier.

The result is occasionally a little frantic — animated segments sometimes bring the past to life and sometimes get in the way — and often tremendously moving. The interviews with Guy Blaché and with her daughter, Simone, bring a tender, complicated dimension of personality, and make it feel as if the dawn of movies is not so far away after all. The present-day celebrities, who seem to become instant experts after their initial confessions of cluelessness, add little beyond their own boldface names. (An exception is Jodie Foster, who provides voice-over narration and served as an executive producer.) The preservationists and film historians are the truly fascinating characters, and it would be good to learn even more about the work of rescue and recovery they do.

“Be Natural” is inspiring because it is also appalling. The near-forgetting of Guy Blaché wasn’t just an accident of film history, though the fact that most of her work belongs to the years before World War I made it especially vulnerable to loss. Green notes that she is less well-known than contemporaries like Lois Weber and Dorothy Arzner, but those women were also written out of film history or pushed to its margins.

Guy Blaché found America a more welcoming working environment than France. But in both countries the record of her achievements was erased. Her early Gaumont pictures were attributed to her male assistants, and their originality and quality went unrecognized, in spite of evidence of her influence on later auteurs like Sergei Eisenstein and Alfred Hitchcock. When it was remembered at all, Solax Studios was thought of as Herbert Blaché’s company.

Green’s revision of that record is long overdue and just in time, given the present-day reckoning with Hollywood’s stubborn traditions of behind-the-scenes (and onscreen) sexism. Most intriguing are the clips the documentary gathers from Guy Blaché’s films. Many of them look less like old curiosities than lost classics, and their range — from the surreal slapstick of “The Drunken Mattress,” to the domestic melodrama of “Falling Leaves,” to the social satire of “Consequences of Feminism” — is astonishing. (Several have been issued by Kino Lorber in the indispensable “Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers” collection). By the end of “Be Natural,” you won’t only have a clear idea of who this remarkable woman was; you may well have acquired a new taste in old movies.

New York Times: Overlooked No More: Alice Guy Blaché, the World’s First Female Filmmaker

Even before women had the right to vote, Blaché, in her actions and in her films, expressed female drives, desires and self-determination.

Published Sept. 6, 2019

Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

By Manohla Dargis

In 1911, The Moving Picture News wrote that Alice Guy Blaché, the first female filmmaker in history, was a “fine example of what a woman can do if given a square chance in life.”

Blaché had already founded a successful film company in the United States by the time the article was published, announcing a new studio she was opening in New Jersey. She soon built that studio, adding to her triumphs. Cinema was Blaché’s passion — she called it her Prince Charming — and it took her across continents and centuries in a life shaped both by soaring achievements and by some of the same struggles that women moviemakers face today.

She was aware of her singularity.

“I have produced some of the biggest productions ever released by a motion picture company,” Blaché told the entertainment weekly The New York Clipper in 1912.

She made — directed, produced or supervised (often doing triple duty) — about 1,000 films, many of them short, the standard at the time.

She would later leave the industry at a time when her life was marred by personal and professional disappointments, then spend years trying to claim her place in the very history that she had helped make.

Like other trailblazing women from cinema’s formative years, Blaché has been discovered, somehow overlooked and rediscovered anew. Only now, largely because of the feminist film scholars who are writing women back into history, does her place seem secure.

Blaché got her start in films when she was 22 and working as a secretary in Paris for Léon Gaumont, an inventor who had begun manufacturing motion-picture cameras. To demonstrate them to clients, his company made short films that Blaché thought could be better.

“I had read a good deal,” she wrote in “The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché,” which was ushered into publication posthumously in 1976 by the historian Anthony Slide. And she had done some “amateur theatricals.”

Blaché, center, in a scene from “Sage-Femme de Première Classe” (“First Class Midwife”), from 1902, about a young couple who go shopping for a baby. (Blaché played the husband.)Credit...Photograph Collections of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

She asked Gaumont if she could film a few scenes.

“It seems like a silly, girlish thing to do,” Gaumont told her, Blaché recalled many decades later in a French television interview, “but you can try if you want. On one condition: that your office work does not suffer.”

Armed with a cameraman, an actress and a painted backdrop, she made “La Fée aux Choux” (“The Cabbage Fairy”) in 1896, her first film. A pantomimed one-minute charmer, it shows a young woman who, with a smile and a bosom wreathed in flowers, plucks squalling naked babies from a cabbage patch constructed out of wood. Some historians believe that Blaché’s inaugural effort was “Sage-Femme de Première Classe” (“First Class Midwife”) her 1902 remake about a young couple who go shopping for a baby. (Blaché played the husband.)

Gaumont soon made Blaché the head of film production at his company, where she produced and supervised hundreds of films, helped create an organized studio system years before Hollywood was a company town and trained luminaries of the art like Louis Feuillade. When she moved to the United States, where she resumed her film career, her time at Gaumont was touted in profiles. In 1912, the trade journal The Movie Picture World, wrote: “She inaugurated the presentation of little plays on the screen by that company some 16 or 17 years ago.”

Alice Ida Antoinette Guy was born in Saint-Mandé, on the eastern edge of Paris, on July 1, 1873. Her parents, Marie and Émile Guy, were French but lived in Chile, where her father was a bookseller; Marie returned to France for Alice’s birth and then left the child with a grandmother. Three years later, Marie returned for Alice, and they sailed to Chile. While passing through the Strait of Magellan, near Chile’s southern tip, as she recalled in her memoir, she conjured up fairies and beasts on walls of ice — an early, whimsical prelude to her screen reveries.

Assorted tragedies in Chile followed, and the Guys eventually returned to France, but over time the family disintegrated, leaving Alice to support her mother.

Much of Alice’s early years seemed to prepare her for a life in cinema, filled as they were with adventures, deprivations and moments of fortitude. In her first secretarial position, in an all-male factory, she recalled, she boldly stood up to a sexual harasser.

“My youth, my inexperience, my sex,” Blaché wrote of her entrance into moviemaking, “all conspired against me.” But she was hardworking and tenacious, and would prove to be prolific.

In 1894, she talked Gaumont, then the second-in-command at a photography company, into hiring her. Not long after, Gaumont formed his own company and Blaché became a pioneer, making films that were colored by hand and others that used a pioneering sound system, which synced visuals with prerecorded wax cylinders. Blaché can be seen in one clip starting a phonograph while she directs both the cast and the crew. Among her Gaumont titles are “La Femme Collante,” a risqué charmer about a maid with an amusingly sticky tongue, and “Le Matelas Alcoolique” about a peripatetic mattress with a drunken man sewn into it.

In 1907, she married Herbert Blaché, another Gaumont employee, and resigned as head of film production to accompany him to the United States, where he was sent to promote Gaumont’s sync-sound film system. The undertaking was a bust. But in 1910, two years after giving birth to their daughter, Simone, Alice Blaché formed the Solax Company and began making her own movies. She was so successful that in 1912 — the year she gave birth to their son, Reginald — Blaché built her own state-of-the-art studio in Fort Lee, N.J., then a bustling film town.

She kept up a heroic pace at Solax. She would jump in her car or on a horse to scout locations, including an orphanage, an opium parlor, night court and Sing Sing prison, where she declined the invitation to witness an execution. She supervised other directors and assistants, oversaw a stock company of adult and child actors, and corralled a menagerie of animal performers, among them rats, lions, panthers and a 600-pound tiger named Princess. On one studio wall she hung a sign that read, “Be Natural.”

Her interest in realism as well as performance dovetailed with what her biographer Alison McMahan said was Blaché’s greatest achievement. Her films, McMahan said in a phone interview, “focused on the psychological perspective of the central characters.

Blaché told The Clipper in 1912: “I have always impressed upon my associate directors that success comes only to those who give the public what it wants, plus something else. That something else I would call our individuality, if you please.”

Blaché expanded her repertoire at Solax with cowboy films like “Two Little Rangers,” which features a pair of gun-toting heroines, one of them a girl with long curls who backs a villain off a cliff. Whether or not it was feminist by design, the film is feminist by default. Blaché wondered if women were ready for the right to vote, but in her actions and in her films she expressed female drives, desires and self-determination.

At Solax, she successfully made the transition to feature filmmaking, creating longer, more narratively complex titles that were well-received, though they also entailed higher production costs and longer preparations. Yet while Blaché navigated the shift to features creatively, she didn’t weather the seismic changes affecting the fast-growing movie world, including monopolistic distribution practices. By 1914, she and Herbert Blaché had joined forces with another enterprise for which they both directed.

The last chapter of Blaché’s filmmaking career was marred by setbacks and disappointments both in her new ventures with her husband and as a director for hire. She made “The Ocean Waif,” a touching romance about an abused young woman and a writer that gives (almost) equal weight to both.

Other films followed, but by the time she directed the well-regarded “Her Great Adventure,” Blaché was struggling with her health, financial difficulties, a broken marriage and continued industry upheaval. She declined to direct a “Tarzan” movie. In 1922, the Solax studio was auctioned off, and Blaché, now divorced, returned to France with her two children.

In France she tried to find film work with no luck. It’s unclear why she didn’t succeed, although by the 1920s, the movies were a big business and no longer as hospitable to women who wanted to make their own films. She sold her books, paintings and other possessions and wrote articles and children’s stories.

She and her daughter, who worked for the American Foreign Service, spent the last years of World War II in Switzerland, where Blaché began writing her memoir. She also tried to find her films, but most were unavailable and presumed lost. She nevertheless persevered, gave interviews and in time gained some recognition for her pioneering role in cinema.

Blaché wrote of her life: “It is a failure; is it a success? I don’t know.” She died on March, 24, 1968, in a nursing home in New Jersey. She was 94.

In 2012, the Fort Lee Film Commission installed a new gravestone for Blaché. The original one had noted only her name and the dates of her birth and death. The new memorial states that Alice Guy Blaché was “first woman motion picture director,” the “first woman studio head” and the “president of the Solax Company, Fort Lee, N.J.”

The memorial is also adorned with the Solax logo: an image of the sun rising on a new day.

NorthJersey.com: One of the first movie moguls was a woman — and her studio was in Fort Lee

Jim Beckerman, North Jersey Record

Published 6:54 a.m. ET April 24, 2019 | Updated 7:27 a.m. ET April 24, 2019

When the movie business began — roughly 1895 — it was the Wild West. There were no rules. And consequently there was no one to tell Alice Guy-Blaché that ladies do not become movie directors.

So you can hardly blame her, in 1896, for becoming the first female film director — for that matter, one of the first film directors, period.

Nor can you blame her for being an innovator in narrative film, sound film, comedy, fantasy, Westerns, and films of social comment, for becoming one of the first film executives, or for building one of the largest, most advanced movie studios of the day in Fort Lee, in 1912. For being, in short, one of the great formative figures in film history.

"She's the mother of cinema," says film director Pamela B. Green, whose documentary film "Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché" opens April 26 at New York's IFC Center on Sixth Avenue (it will later platform out nationwide). It's already been featured at the Cannes, New York and Telluride film festivals.

"She did the work, took the trail, climbed the mountain," Green says.

Jodie Foster narrates the film, which includes commentary from Ava DuVernay, Julie Taymor, Julie Delpy, Geena Davis, and Sir Ben Kingsley and several Blaché relatives, not to mention New Jersey's own Tom Meyers, executive director of the Fort Lee Film Commission, and Teaneck film historian Richard Koszarski ("Fort Lee: The Film Town"). Fort Lee is a big part of this story.

"This was the first American film town, before the industry moved to Hollywood," Meyers says. "That's why Alice Guy-Blaché moved here."

In an era when women are demanding, more than ever, a place at the Hollywood table, "Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché" is a reminder that in the early days, women took a seat anyway — invited or not.

"She had intelligence, and a great sense of humor," Green says. "She was extremely determined, and passionate, and a hard worker. I related to those elements."

"Be Natural" was the phrase, posted on signboards, on the glassed-in stage of Solax Studios, the enormous $100,000 facility that Guy-Blaché, assisted by her husband, Herbert, built on Lemoine Avenue in Fort Lee (where the Acme supermarket, next to Fort Lee High School, is now).

She wanted to remind her actors not to exaggerate, not to be "theatrical," but to behave like real people. Or, as director John Ford later said, in his gruff, masculine way, "Don't act, react." But Guy-Blaché said it first.

"She wanted them to give a sense of realism, so audiences could emotionally relate and say: That's me, or that's my aunt, or that's my cousin," Green says. "She wanted people to have an emotional connection with the films she was making."

Making a name

In her day, movie directors were seldom credited on screen. But Guy-Blaché was still known, at least within the film community.

She gave interviews. She wrote for magazines ("There is nothing connected with the staging of a motion picture that a woman cannot do as easily as a man," she said in Moving Picture World in 1914). Her work was admired — and imitated — by other directors, including Alfred Hitchcock and Sergei Eisenstein. Viewers loved her use of naturalistic settings, and her ability to coax believable performances from actors.

"She helped develop the grammar of cinema," Green says. "She helped move the medium forward when it was in its infancy, when people didn't believe in it."

Guy-Blaché, who spent her last years in Mahwah and is buried there (she died in 1968), spent the final years of her life writing her autobiography, trying to round up the 1,000 or so films she wrote, directed or produced between 1896 and 1922, and trying to set the record straight with film historians (mostly male), who — when they didn't ignore her completely — often attributed her films to other directors.

"If she had lived just a little bit longer, maybe it could have been different," Green says. "But she was old, and the world wasn't ready. I guess my purpose was to be her last chapter, to restore her legacy, which she couldn't do herself, but which she wanted to do very badly."

Guy-Blaché was in the right place at the right time. The time was 1894. The place was Paris, where the 21-year-old Alice got a job as a secretary to a camera company — which was in turn bought by a consortium that became Gaumont, one of the giants of the early film industry.

Movies, then, were little one-minute slices of life: workers leaving a factory, a train pulling into a station. Motion — any kind of motion — was miraculous enough. 

Not for Guy-Blaché. She was literary: Her father had been a bookstore owner. She pronounced the real-life snippets of street traffic, the seaside bathers and frolicking children, dull. She asked her bosses if she could try to make a film of her own. 

"La fée aux choux" — "The Cabbage Fairy" — made in 1896, depicts a sprite in a cabbage patch, harvesting all the newborn babies (Guy-Blaché knew all about cabbage patch kids 80 years before the American toy industry). It was one of the first — if not the first — staged, fictional films, one of the first to tell a story.  And it launched Guy-Blaché on a 25-year career. In short order, she became head of production at Gaumont.

"She gave film the gift of storytelling," Meyers says. "In America, the first narrative film was 'The Great Train Robbery' [1903]. But Alice was making narrative films well before that."

Her range was prodigious. She made dramatic films like "The Birth, Life and Death of Christ" (1906), "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1913), and "Esmeralda" (1905), an early version of "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame." She made comedies, like "Matrimony's Speed Limit" (1913) and "Canned Harmony" (1912). She made Westerns, like "Algie the Miner" (1912) and "Two Little Rangers" (1912).

She made sound films ("True Jiu Jitsu," 1905, "Indiscreet Questions," 1905) more than two decades before "The Jazz Singer." She made fantasy films with trick effects. She made — notably —  films about gender equality, about reversals of sex roles, about women as take-charge heroes ("In the Year 2000," 1912, "A House Divided," 1913, "Hubby Does the Washing," 1912).  For good measure, she made one of the first films with an African-American cast, "A Fool and His Money" (1912).

Coming to America

In 1910, she had come to America with her her husband, Herbert Blaché, who was then chief of Gaumont's American operations. Soon after, they left Gaumont to form their own studio. 

Solax was originally based in Flushing, Queens, but two years later relocated to Fort Lee — then the center of American movie production, with some 17 studios grinding out films. Several of those studios — notably Solax, Éclair, and Pathé — were French. The French, at that time, were at the forefront of film technique. But America was where the audience and the money were. 

"There were so many French filmmakers living in Fort Lee at this time," Meyers says. "There were French-language newspapers here."

The studio, however, didn't last. Guy-Blaché eventually lost Solax — apparently the financial mismanagement of her husband had a lot to do with it — and in time the studio became a film storage facility. In 1964, the building was torn down.

"It was the 1960s, and there wasn't much thought given in those days to film history," Meyers says. "It's only recently that there's been some acknowledgment. Back in the 1960s, it was pretty forgotten."

Forgotten, also, was Guy-Blaché — as were the many women who followed in her footsteps.

While Guy-Blaché was the first female film director, she was not the only one in the early days.

Lois Weber, Ruth Baldwin, Dorothy Arzner, Leontine Sagan, Lotte Reiniger and Wanda Tuchock are just some of the other women who, in cinema's age of innocence, were calling "Lights, camera, action!"  And it wasn't just directors. There were women screenwriters (Anita Loos, Frances Marion, Jeanie MacPherson, June Mathis). There were women producers (Mary Pickford, Alla Nazimova). What happened to them all?

Theirs was the fate of the cowboy, and the internet startup — the fate of the pioneer.

After the freebooting early days are over, big money, regulation and standardization force out the trailblazers. And when Hollywood became big business, one that men could start taking seriously, the powers-that-be decided — in so many words — that a woman's place was in front of the camera, not behind.

"Once it became a viable business, once people saw that movies had a future and could make money, then women got pushed out and men took over," Green says.

Today, as women are struggling to regain a foothold in an industry they were forced out of, 100 years ago, Alice Guy-Blaché is their patron saint.

"She was an artist and an entrepreneur, and that makes her significant," Green says. "She was a mogul."

benaturalthemovie.com

BBC News: Video Guy-Blache: The untold story of first female film director

Hollywood actress Jodie Foster has narrated a documentary paying tribute to Alice Guy-Blache who is credited with being the world’s first female film director.

Blache made her first movie in 1896 and was subsequently involved in the production of some 1,000 films from shorts to features.

BBC Talking Movies’ Tom Brook reports.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-arts-45878334/guy-blache-the-untold-story-of-first-female-film-director

New York Times: You Know These 20 Movies. Now Meet the Women Behind Them

Lupino and Collins aren’t mentioned in the same breath as Scorsese and
Spike Lee, but they should be. Let’s put them back in the conversation.

By MANOHLA DARGIS and A.O. SCOTT SEPT. 20, 2018

This season will bring a number of female-driven movies, including new work from Nicole Holofcener, Karyn Kusama and other directors who just might be poised for a breakthrough. These films are reminders that even as female activists continue to demand industry reform post-Harvey Weinstein, women — much as they have always done — are also working hard as writers, directors, producers and costume designers.

Women have been on the cinematic front lines from the start. While men took most of the credit for building the movie industry, women — on camera and off, in the executives suites and far from Hollywood — were busily, thrillingly, building it, too. That’s the reason for our list of Movie Women You Should Know, which is not a canon or a pantheon but a celebration and an invitation to further discovery. Here are some of the art’s other pioneers — its independents and entrepreneurs, auteurs and artisans.

ANITA LOOS

She Wrote the Book on Screenwriting

“How to Write Photoplays,” 1920

One of the most prolific and powerful screenwriters of her time — with a career that began in 1912 and stretched into the late ’50s — Anita Loos was in some ways bigger than Hollywood itself. She brought the clout and cachet of a best-selling novelist and successful Broadway playwright to the nascent movie industry, adapting her own work and those of her peers to the new medium. In 1920 she and her husband, John Emerson, published “How to Write Photoplays,” an early example of an enduring genre. This manual for aspiring movie scribes included a wealth of advice both practical (“Writing for the Camera,” “Marketing the Story”) and existential:

Above all things the scenario writer should keep alive. Just keep yourself with lively, laughing, thinking people, think about things yourself, and cultivate a respect for new ideas of any kind. Take care of these small ideas and the big plots will take care of themselves.

Good advice, then and now, and revealing of Loos’s own approach. She was protean and prolific — her credits range from D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance” (1916) to George Cukor’s “The Women” (1939) — sociable and shrewd. “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” her best-seller from 1925, was brought to the screen first in 1928 and then, as a musical, in 1953, with Marilyn Monroe singing about diamonds and Anita Loos laughing all the way to the bank. (A.O. Scott)

➞ Loos wrote in a memoir that “in its heyday, Hollywood reflected, if it did not actually produce, the sexual climate of our land.” She could almost have written that sentence with “I” in place of the word “Hollywood.”

MARION E. WONG

She Directed the First
Chinese-American Film

“The Curse of Quon Gwon,” 1916-17

In July 1917, the magazine the Moving Picture World ran a brief story on the Mandarin Film Company accompanied by a photo of its president, the Chinese-American filmmaker Marion E. Wong. Based in Oakland, Calif. — a source of independent cinema even then — the company, the item read, had recently completed its first film, “The Curse of Quon Gwon” and was expected “to continue the production of films dealing with Chinese subjects.” It was “the only Chinese producing concern in this country.”

“The Curse of Quon Gwon: When the Far East Mingles With the West,” as it is fully titled, proved to be Wong’s only film. The earliest known movie by a Chinese-American filmmaker, it was long thought lost until the director Arthur Dong happened upon some surviving material while making his 2007 documentary “Hollywood Chinese.” Even in its current truncated form, Wong’s film beguiles partly because of its melodrama — a young couple, a lonely bride, cultural dissonance, the promised misfortune — and because of flourishes of beauty, like the image of a woman gazing into a mirror before her life is cleaved in two. (Manohla Dargis)

DEDE ALLEN

She Edited Gangsters So They Flew

“Bonnie and Clyde,” 1967

“Make it go faster.” That’s what the director Arthur Penn told Dede Allen when she was editing “Bonnie and Clyde.” She did, brilliantly. Over a decades-long career, she edited six films by Penn, who saw her as a true collaborator, calling Allen “an artist” and an “essential part of the creative process.” She worked hard, memorizing every frame until the footage ran in her head. Likening herself to the actors, Allen said she, too, became the roles to “viscerally, emotionally feel the way the characters feel.”

Dede Allen Associated Press

Like all of filmmaking, editing was wide open to women in cinema’s earliest years. By the 1920s, though, the regimented studio system had become divided along gender roles. Although some women had lengthy careers as studio cutters, by the late 1930s, as Allen once said, “it was not considered proper for a girl to come in and take a job from a father with children.” She and her husband moved to New York, where she edited her first notable feature in 1959 and in time helped filmmakers revolutionize the art by turning editing into energy, feeling, character. (M.D.)

➞ Director Arthur Penn wanted to give “Bonnie and Clyde” all “this energy” Allen said. “We were able to go in with angles and close-ups and only pull back when we wanted to show what Arthur called ‘the tapestry,’” she explained, adding “I broke many of my hard and fast rules about story, character and how a scene plays.”

ALICE GUY BLACHÉ

She Was the First Woman
in the Director’s Chair

“The Cabbage Fairy,” 1896

Alice Guy Blaché helped invent cinema as we know it. The first female filmmaker and among the first to make a fiction film, she made her debut in 1896 with the one-minute “The Cabbage Fairy.” She shot this charmer — which shows a sprite smilingly plucking real babies from a cabbage patch — on a Paris patio while working as a secretary for Gaumont, which would soon be a film powerhouse. Historians ignored and even rejected that date perhaps, as the theorist Jane M. Gaines has suggested, it was unthinkable that a young female secretary supporting a widowed mother could be responsible for an early-cinema milestone.

Guy Blaché is thought to have made some 1,000 films (mostly shorts) that included cowboy flicks, cross-dressing comedies and melodramas; about 150 had synchronized sound (this was before the industry widely embraced sound). She founded a film company, Solax, and built a studio in Fort Lee, N.J., where she hung a banner for her actors that read, “Be Natural.” Her last film was released in 1920 and then she was forgotten until scholars began to realize that she had been there all along. (M.D.)

BARBARA LODEN

She Had It With Men and
Made a Film About It

“Wanda,” 1970

“Wanda,” the only feature Barbara Loden directed — she was not yet 50 when she died, in 1980 — is a movie both of and ahead of its time. Like many American films of its time, “Wanda,” made in 1970, is the story of an earnest quest for freedom set in a vividly naturalistic American landscape. But most of the rebels and seekers of the New Hollywood were men, heirs of Huck Finn in flight from social conventions and, as often as not, the demands of women.

Wanda Goronski, played by Loden herself, tells a different story. An unhappy housewife in Pennsylvania’s coal country — where Loden grew up — her prospects are defined, thwarted and betrayed by men. There is a blunt, brutal matter-of-factness in the way Loden portrays Wanda’s fate as she leaves her husband and drifts through problematic love affairs. There is also a quiet and insistent empathy.

Before turning to writing and directing, Loden appeared in “Wild River” and “Splendor in the Grass,” both directed by Elia Kazan, whom she married in 1967. The vaunted realism of Kazan’s films can seem downright sentimental compared with “Wanda,” which has an honesty about marriage, work, sex and class that still feels radical and raw. (A.O.S.)

LEIGH BRACKETT

She Scripted Hard-Boiled Men

“The Big Sleep,” 1946

“She wrote that like a man” — this was the gruff praise that the director Howard Hawks bestowed on the screenwriter Leigh Brackett’s work on “The Big Sleep.” They met because Hawks had been looking for someone who could help turn the Raymond Chandler novel into a film for Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Hawks thought Brackett had the right strong stuff after reading one of her crime novels. “He was somewhat shaken,” she said later, “when he discovered that it was Miss and not Mr. Brackett.”

Brackett was 28 when Hawks brought her in to write “The Big Sleep” along with William Faulkner. “He was wonderful on construction,” she said of Faulkner, “but just couldn’t write lines an actor could speak.” A prolific science-fiction author, Brackett kept writing scripts — notably Hawks’s “Rio Bravo” — and turned in the first draft of “The Empire Strikes Back” just before she died at age 62 in 1978. (M.D.)

IDA LUPINO

She Gave Noir Its Emotion

“Outrage,” 1950

“I don’t want to smile all the time,” Ida Lupino said in 1942. She was 24 and under contract at Warner Bros., which wanted her to be another Bette Davis. Reluctant to take Davis’s seconds, Lupino had signed a strategic short contract with the studio that allowed her to work elsewhere. She went on to make great films at Warners, but there were bad roles, too, and frustration. By 1949, she was ready to be truly independent, citing the neorealist director Roberto Rossellini as inspiration. “When are you going to make pictures about ordinary people in ordinary situations?” he had asked her.

Lupino answered by founding a company, The Filmmakers, with her husband and one other. They were set to shoot their first film, “Not Wanted” — about an unwed mother — when its director fell ill. Lupino discreetly took over. Lupino kept on calling the shots, and for decades was the only female director in Hollywood. Working with low budgets and sometimes uneven casts, she turned sensation into emotion in lean, tense, tough films like “Outrage,” a shadow-strafed noir about a young woman who, after she is raped, is forced to find herself. (M.D.)

LOTTE REINIGER

She Was the Anti-Disney

“The Adventures of Prince Achmed,” 1926

More than a decade before Walt Disney released “Snow White” — often cited as the first animated feature — the German animator Lotte Reiniger completed “The Adventures of Prince Achmed,” which used hand-cut paper silhouettes photographed against a tinted background to tell a fanciful story of enchantment and danger. Like Disney, Reiniger mined the canon of European fairy tales to provide entertainment for children, completing more than 70 films, including versions of “Puss in Boots,” “Hansel and Gretel” and “Cinderella” in a career that began during World War I and lasted until 1980.

Lotte Reiniger working on silhouettes for “Prince Achmed.” ullstein bild/Getty Images

In Berlin in the 1920s, Reiniger was part of an international circle of artists and intellectuals that included Bertolt Brecht and Jean Renoir. She made a handful of live-action films and a series of short sound movies based on operas and classical music. Most of that work is lost, but “Prince Achmed” and the silent shorts that survive testify to the power of her technique, a haunting, painstaking and expressive form of animation with roots in ancient puppetry and shadow theater. Reiniger herself wielded the scissors, fashioning intricate backgrounds and figures that float in blue or pink light, at once eerily timeless and strikingly modern. Her blend of whimsy and spookiness, the dreamy images that seem to tap right into the collective unconscious suggest both an antidote to Disney and a precursor to Tim Burton. (A.O.S.)

MARY BLAIR

She Put Color in Disney’s World

“Alice in Wonderland,” 1951

Mary Blair around 1941 Estate of Mary Blair, via the Walt Disney Family Museum

“Walt said that I knew about colors he had never heard of before.”

Like many women, Mary Blair has too often been relegated to the margins in a great man’s biography, despite bringing wonder and ravishing color to Walt Disney’s world. Born in 1911, Blair began working for Disney reluctantly (her word) in 1940 as a sketch artist. She might have hesitated because she had trained as a fine artist, but she also may have known that at Disney most women worked in the ink and paint department (dubbed “the nunnery”), translating the male animators’ drawings onto celluloid.

A scene from “Alice in Wonderland” Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment

Blair soon branched out. She helped the writers for “Dumbo,” as she put it, “create the ideas of the picture graphically right from its basic beginning.” In time, she was such a major influence on Disney himself that the historian John Canemaker argued that “the stylishness and vibrant color” of the studio’s films from the early 1940s through the mid-1950s — including the at times eye-poppingly trippy “Alice in Wonderland” — came from Blair. Her flat modernist aesthetic didn’t fit the studio’s soft three-dimensional realism, but her extraordinary colors and concepts influenced its films, including “Cinderella” and “Peter Pan.” (M.D.)

➞ Marc Davis, one of the legendary Disney animators known as the Nine Old Men, said Blair “spent most of her life misunderstood.” Her male colleagues, he said, based their designs on perspective, while Blair “did things on marvelous flat panels,” work that “tragically” never got to the screen.

EDITH HEAD

She Dressed Hollywood for Success

“All About Eve,” 1950

Costume designers are visible almost solely through their work, but Edith Head was an exception. A celebrity in her own right — and the author of a rigorous and highly practical 1967 “How to Dress for Success” manual — she was recognizable for her signature blue-tinted glasses, diminutive stature and dark, straight bangs. She was the inspiration for Edna Mode in Pixar’s “Incredibles” films.

But first, and more importantly, she inspired generations of men and women with dreams of glamour. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that Head — along with her chief rival, the equally prolific Irene Sharaff — taught postwar moviegoers how to appreciate the seductive and semiotic power of clothes.

Bette Davis and Gary Merrill in “All About Eve.” 20th Century Fox/Kobal Collection

Head was nominated for 35 Oscars and won eight. Two of those came in a single year, 1951, when separate costume design awards were given for color and black-and-white films and Head won both: for the soigné Manhattan elegance of Joseph Mankiewicz’s “All About Eve” and for the sword-and-sandals proto-camp of Cecil B. DeMille’s “Samson and Delilah.” What you remember most are the two leading ladies, Bette Davis and Hedy Lamarr. They dressed not only for success but for power, grace, guile and immortality, too. (A.O.S.)

SONYA LEVIEN

She Took the Shtetl to Hollywood

“Salome of the Tenements,” 1925

“Salome of the Tenements,” a melodrama from 1925, is one of thousands of “lost films” of the silent era. Luckily, its source material, Anzia Yezierska’s novel, is still around, offering insight into the life of its screenwriter, Sonya Levien.

“Salome” is a feminist potboiler, a tale of enterprise and upward mobility that follows Sonya Mendel from sweatshop seamstress to prosperous fashion designer. Levien, born Sonya Opesken in Russia in 1888, was not exactly like her fictional namesake, but her journey from shtetl to slum to the studio lots of Hollywood — where she became one of the most in-demand screenwriters of her time — stands as a quintessential early-20th-century American story.

After the 1920s vogue for immigrant stories faded, Levien applied her talents to musicals, westerns and historical epics. Among her many credits are all three versions of “State Fair.” That movie, in its nonmusical (1933) and musical (1945 and 1962) incarnations, is a hearty helping of Iowa corn. That it’s served up partly by a daughter of Ukraine and the Lower East Side is testimony to the endlessly adaptable talents of Sonya Levien. (A.O.S.)

KATHLEEN COLLINS

She Put the Brains in the Rom-Com

“Losing Ground,” 1982

Death robbed us too early of Kathleen Collins, a short-story writer, playwright and filmmaker who was just 46 when she died in 1988. Even so, there is much to rejoice about what she left behind, notably “Losing Ground.” A sui generis film that’s part existential rom-com, part philosophical argument, it tracks Sara (Seret Scott), a charmingly self-serious professor who’s trying to get an intellectual handle on what she terms “ecstatic experience” while her freewheeling artist husband (Bill Gunn) pursues his own understanding. (She needs to get out of her head and into her body.)

The radicalness of “Losing Ground” endures. It takes intellectual and aesthetic inquiries as seriously (and as sexily) as a European art film (Collins admired Eric Rohmer), which must have baffled distributors who had ideas about what constituted a black film: “Losing Ground” played at festivals but was never theatrically released in her lifetime. “My private audience is black people,” Collins said. “I don’t write for anybody else. But I don’t write for them in a political sense, I write for them out of my image memory because my image memory is full of black people. I write for my aunts, my cousins.” (M.D.)

FRANCES FLAHERTY

She Shaped Fact Into Film

“Moana,” 1926

There is an astonishing passage in Frances Flaherty’s diary from 1915 in which she writes about the life she hoped to have with her husband, Robert Flaherty, the pioneering documentarian. She dreamed they would set off together on a great adventure and experience a “rare relationship, a wonderful passionate partnership.” Fate intervened, or perhaps pragmatism, after she became pregnant. Before her dream began, she knew she had to turn back and that, as he set off, “it was too truly a parting of the ways.”

Lupenga and Fa’angase as seen in “Moana.” Frances Hubbard Flaherty/Kino Lorber

Yet a remarkable partnership did endure. Frances collaborated on the films for which her husband is known, including “Moana,” a lush, romantic fiction-documentary hybrid shot in Samoa. After his death, she helped burnish his legend through her writings and the creation of the nonprofit Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. To read her early diaries, though, is to grasp that Frances didn’t only help turn her husband into a legend but also a filmmaker: In 1916, she wrote that she had “decided beyond doubt now in my own mind” that Robert needed to focus on his next film, one that he began shooting in 1920 and titled “Nanook of the North.” (M.D.)

SHIRLEY CLARKE

She Made Documentaries Lyrical

“Portrait of Jason,” 1967

Shirley Clarke directed an Oscar-winning film, but no one would mistake her for a member of the Hollywood establishment. She placed herself in the aesthetic lineage of Italian neorealism, and while many of her films can be classified as documentaries, her tough, lyrical insights into the lives of real people transform the journalistic implications of that label. By the same token, her scripted features have the vivid immediacy and rough texture of life itself.

Clarke’s subjects — artists, musicians, gang members, drug addicts and perhaps most famously a gay hustler named Jason Holliday — were usually male and frequently African-American. But her films were nonetheless strongly personal, for reasons Clarke, who was white, explained once in an interview. “I identified with black people because I couldn’t deal with the woman question and I transposed it. I could understand very easily the black problems, and I somehow equated them to how I felt.” Her “Portrait of Jason” is thus also a self-portrait, an exploration of the subjectivity of the woman behind the camera as well as the man in front of it. (A.O.S.)

Jason Holliday in Clarke’s film. Milestone Film & Video

MARGARET BOOTH

She Edited Her Way to Power at MGM

“Mutiny on the Bounty,” 1935

In the old, pre-talkie days, the people who sliced and spliced silent film were called “cutters.” Early in the sound era, Irving Thalberg, the farseeing head of production at MGM, rechristened them “film editors,” a credit first bestowed upon, and quite possibly designed for, Margaret Booth.

Booth, who died in 2002 at 104, started out cutting negatives for D.W. Griffith, and went on to master the subtle rhythms of cinematic storytelling. “It’s like the pauses and breaths you take on the stage,” she said of her craft. “It has its ups and downs and its pace.” A pioneer in adapting silent-movie techniques to sound film, she was nominated for an Oscar for “Mutiny on the Bounty,” one of the biggest critical and commercial hits of 1935 and a groundbreaking blend of star power (Charles Laughton, Clark Gable and Franchot Tone), literary prestige and sophisticated action.

By that time Booth was established as one of the most powerful people at MGM in its heyday. According to the film historian Ally Acker, for three decades, no MGM film was released “without Booth’s approval.” In effect, she had final cut. (A.O.S.)

VIRGINIA VAN UPP

She Wrote Her Way to Power at Columbia

“Gilda,” 1946

In 1944, the Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn appointed Virginia Van Upp the studio’s executive producer, putting her in charge of its top pictures. She had already proved her value to Cohn by turning “Cover Girl” into a hit for Rita Hayworth, one of the studio’s biggest stars. Van Upp went on to do the same with “Gilda,” an indelible female-centric noir with a luminous Hayworth that Van Upp not only rewrote but also produced.

A former child actress, Van Upp had grown up in the industry, working in different areas before turning to writing, explaining her career choice to one interviewer simply: “What kind of a job can a woman hold after she has gray hair and is fat?” She was a hitmaker first for Paramount and then for Columbia, where she became the rare woman in charge in that era. “My only interest in producing,” she said, “is to have freedom as a writer.”

It wasn’t always easy. She told one of Cohn’s biographers that she had been forced to rebuff her boss, telling him that she wanted a clause in her new contract prohibiting him from committing “verbal rape.” He declined, but they apparently made their peace. Even so, Van Upp soon left Columbia, periodically returning to work even as her career faded out. (M.D.)

FRANCES MARION

She Helped Tough Guys Use Their Words

“The Big House,” 1930

There are movie legends and then there is Frances Marion, a legend’s legend. A 1925 ad for one of the films she wrote declared that she was “the greatest woman creative genius of the screen.” There was no need to qualify her achievement. She was one of the most powerful screenwriters in early Hollywood and, for a while, the highest paid of any gender.

Chester Morris and Wallace Beery in “The Big House.” Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Marion started as an actress but soon turned to writing in a career that saw the female-friendly industry become increasingly less welcoming to her sex. Her output was phenomenal — her biographer Cari Beauchamp credits her on 325 films — and included adaptations and original work. She’s closely associated with Mary Pickford (“The Poor Little Rich Girl”), but Marion also wrote the excellent prison drama, “The Big House” — she visited San Quentin to research it — starring a machine-gun toting Wallace Beery. With that film, she became the first female writer to win an Oscar; two years later, she picked up more gold for the tear-stained boxing film “The Champ.”

The title of her Hollywood memoir — wittily, fittingly — is “Off With Their Heads.” (M.D.)

VERA CHYTILOVA

She Rebelled in the Cold War

“Daisies,” 1966

Two young women — roommates at large in a big city, with high spirits and low expectation — challenge propriety, men and their own imaginations. They are both named Marie, and their friendship proves stronger than the pull of rules, responsibilities or romance.

Ivana Karbanova in “Daisies.” Criterion Collection

A further summary of Vera Chytilova’s “Daisies,” made with slender means and wild ambitions, is not really possible. It’s one of the great films of the Czech New Wave, a movement that was, like other new waves, largely a boy’s rebellion. After the Soviet invasion of 1968, Chytilova had difficulty making films, returning to form in the ’70s with a run of documentaries, historical films, dramas and comedies. After the fall of communism, her earlier films were rediscovered, and “Daisies” has taken its place among the essential movies of the ’60s, a bolt of liberatory lightning that illuminates future possibilities. (A.O.S.)

MAYA DEREN

She Invented American Experimental Film

“Meshes of the Afternoon,” 1943

“Experimental film” can sometimes seem like a phrase in search of a definition. But at least in America its parentage is not in doubt. Whatever experimental film might be, Maya Deren is its mother and “Meshes of the Afternoon” is its founding text.

A 13-and-a-half-minute, 16-millimeter black-and-white suite of dreamlike images — including a shot of Deren leaning against a window pane that has achieved the status of an icon — “Meshes” was made in 1943 in Los Angeles, shortly after Deren, who was born in Kiev in 1917, had moved there with her second husband, the Czech filmmaker Alexander Hammid. For all its surreal imagery, the film also has a poignant documentary value, offering a glimpse of a place, a time and an artistic sensibility that seem at once vivid and elusive. (A.O.S.)

➞ Deren once told an interviewer that “the reason that I had not been a very good poet was because actually my mind worked in images which I had been trying to translate or describe in words; therefore, when I undertook cinema, I was relieved of the false step of translating image into words.”

HANNAH WEINSTEIN

She Gave People of Color Starring Roles

“Claudine,” 1974

“Claudine,” the story of a romance between a garbage collector and a single mother on welfare, is a potent, tender, unjustly neglected work of ’70s social realism. Starring Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones, and directed by John Berry, it was the first feature produced by Third World Films, a company founded by, among others, Ossie Davis, Rita Moreno and Hannah Weinstein. Its goals were “to train people of color for work in the film industry and to make feature films from a minority perspective.”

For Weinstein, “Claudine” was one of several points of intersection between movies and politics. Born in 1911, she worked on the campaigns of Fiorello H. La Guardia and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, among others. Part of the left-wing diaspora during the McCarthy era, she settled in London and started Sapphire Films, which produced scripts by blacklisted Hollywood writers, including series episodes written (under a pseudonym) by Ring Lardner Jr. Weinstein herself was designated a “concealed Communist” by the F.B.I.

Her activism continued until her death in 1984, and her further contributions to American movies included “Greased Lightning” and “Stir Crazy,” vehicles for Richard Pryor she produced. (A.O.S.)