Published in 2003
408 pages
Alison McMahan is an award-winning screenwriter and author. Alice Guy Blaché, Lost Visionary of the Cinema, won two awards, was translated into Spanish, adapted into a play, and is now being produced as a documentary by a Hollywood production company.
McMahan has trudged through the jungles of Honduras and Cambodia, through the favelas of Brazil and from race tracks to drag strips in the U.S. in search of footage for her documentaries. Her first novel, The Saffron Crocus, a historical YA mystery, was released in 2014. She has stories in anthologies published by Wild Rose Press, LevelBest Books, Down & Out Books, and HarperCollins.
What is this book about?
Alice Guy Blaché (1873-1968), the world’s first woman filmmaker, was one of the key figures in the development of narrative film. From 1896 to 1920 she directed 400 films (including over 100 synchronized sound films), produced hundreds more, and was the first–and so far the only–woman to own and run her own studio plant (The Solax Studio in Fort Lee, NJ, 1910-1914). However, her role in film history was completely forgotten until her own memoirs were published in 1976. This new book tells her life story and fills in many gaps left by the memoirs. Guy Blaché ‘s life and career mirrored momentous changes in the film industry, and the long time-span and sheer volume of her output makes her films a fertile territory for the application of new theories of cinema history, the development of film narrative, and feminist film theory. The book provides a close analysis of the one hundred Guy Blaché films that survive, and in the process rewrites early cinema history.
