Alice Guy-Blaché

The earliest days of cinema, from the late 1880s to the late 1900s, was a fascinating, fabulous time where pioneers came and went, rose and fell, and the art form grew and expanded from one day to the next. Almost all of the films made then are long gone, and what we have left now are bits and pieces, often with unknown dates and unknown makers, but what is left is exciting enough for a lifetime of studies. One of the most impressive and important contributors to this period is Alice Guy-Blaché, who was present at Lumière's first public screening of films in Paris in late 1895, and almost immediately began her own career as a filmmaker of great ambition and inventiveness. Last year a new documentary about her was released, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (Pamela B. Green, 2018), which generated a lot of publicity and interest in Guy-Blaché's life and work. I finally watched it last week, and it is an engaging and well-edited and professionally narrated film. The topic naturally appeals to me, but at the same time, the title of the film, and its marketing campaign, had annoyed me a great deal because the story about Alice Guy-Blaché is not untold. There are books, articles, video essays, retrospectives and previous documentaries about her, about her life and career. As an example, The Lost Garden: The Life and Cinema of Alice Guy-Blaché (Marquise Lepage 1995), a great Canadian documentary, tells the exact same story as Be Natural. The Canadian one is 40 minutes shorter, but that is not because Be Natural provides more information about Guy-Blaché. The extra time is primarily spent on celebrating the team who made Be Natural, whom, you might think, single-handedly discovered Guy-Blaché and gave her back to the world.

Despite all earlier research and books and films about her, Guy-Blaché is still not a well-known name among people at large, but if you have studied early cinema and film history you would have come across her name. Very few of the early pioneers are remembered today, and many of their careers ended in failure and they became invisible, but despite the contention of the title and the film itself, Guy-Blaché is one of the very few who actually is remembered today. It is made a point in the film that Thomas Edison and Lumière brothers are more well-known than she is, and this is true, but they are not known or remembered as filmmakers but as inventors. Guy-Blaché was not an inventor, she was a filmmaker and studio head, and those of her peers from the earliest days of cinema (before D.W. Griffith and that era) are almost all, with the obvious exception of Georges Méliès, forgotten today unless among film scholars specialising in that era. The way Griffith in particular has come to completely dominate conventional film history of the 1900s and 1910s is both unfair and ahistorical and Guy-Blaché, who was well acknowledged and celebrated at the time, is sadly a victim of this. So are many others. Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince made a couple of short films in 1888 in Leeds, and they are the oldest moving images I have ever seen, yet he is hardly ever mentioned. Max and Emil Skladanowsky organised a public screening for moving images in Berlin in November of 1895, almost two months before the Lumière brothers did their first public screening in Paris, yet it is rare that the Skladanowsky screening is mentioned. Such is the unfair nature of early cinema history.

Falling Leaves (1912)

There is another way that Be Natural lacks a necessary film historical context, and that is that, in the film, Guy-Blaché seems to have been alone at doing what she was doing. Yes, she experimented with sound, colour, editing, narrative, but so did many others, including, eventually, other women. She was perhaps unique in her business acumen, in the way she moved to the United States and started a film studio (Solax), but this does not make her a uniquely inventive filmmaker. It is suggested in the documentary that Guy-Blaché made a film in 1896, The Cabbage Fairy (La Fée aux Choux), that would be one of the first fiction films telling a story, which in some commentaries and reviews has been transformed into the claim that Guy-Blaché made the very first fiction film that tells a story. Given that the overwhelming majority of all films made at the time have been lost, it is impossible to say whether any remaining film was the first of anything. We cannot even say with certainty that Guy-Blaché made a film in 1896 and there is much speculation about The Cabbage Fairy (see here for example): did she make one in 1896 or is the one available now, which is referred to as the 1896 one, a remake from 1900, or maybe from 1902, and the one from 1896 is lost? Or is the one from 1900/1902 the first one, and she never made a film in 1896? Some have referred to a print in the archives at the Swedish Film Institute, which is listed as being from 1896, as proof that she made one in 1896, but the date of that print is an estimate and not a certainty either. It proves nothing. They only reason why we are debating whether she made a film in 1896, despite there being no proof of its existence, is that she said so in her autobiography, and in some later interviews. But our memories are not necessarily to be trusted, and her description of the plot of the alleged film of 1896 match a later film she made, and which does exist. These are important nuances that are not to be found in Be Natural.

But the bottom line is that it does not really matter if she made one in 1896 or not, either way her legacy and importance are the same, with or without that potential film. And even if a print was found and that it was established without doubt that this was the 1896 version, it would still not prove that it was the first of anything.

There is one version of The Cabbage Fairy available online with the year 1896 attached to it, which is, probably, erroneous. But if this one in fact is from 1896, as some claim, it is correct that it is a work of fiction but it does not tell a story or provide a narrative; it is just a woman walking through rows of cabbage, and picking up babies. It is not something new and not different from many other films of that year or the year before, such as historic re-enactments like The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895), or the many fictional staging of crimes and chases that were made in 1895 and early 1896.

At another point in the documentary, there is some excitement about her film Matrimony's Speed Limit, which has editing, alternates between medium shots and close-ups, and tells a longer story than the earlier ones with one shot/one setup. But that film was made in 1913, and there was nothing new and interesting about it, technically. In 1913, what was new and exciting were full-length features of depth and complexity like The Student of Prague by Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye or Victor Sjöström's Ingeborg Holm. It becomes absurd of praising Guy-Blaché for doing something, a short comedy with a race against time, that had already been done for years, including by herself in all likelihood.

Celebrating the work and achievements of Guy-Blaché is a good thing, and easy to do. As Be Natural has brought renewed attention to Guy-Blaché and her work, I am in that regard happy that it was made, and can be shown around the world. But her achievements are exceptional as they are and do not have to be embellished and exaggerated. I think that it belittles her, as if what she had actually done was not good enough. One of her major accomplishments was her central position in Gaumont's production of chronophone films. Guy Blaché directed/supervised maybe as many as 150 of these short sound films, called Phonoscènes, but this is barely mentioned in Be Natural. They say she experimented with sound but not how, for how long and what that entailed. The focus of the film is not always to Guy-Blaché's advantage. The way the film highlights its own makers, make them out to be heroes, almost at Guy-Blaché's expense and certainly at the expense of all those scholars and researchers that came before this film, does raise some ethical questions.

I have been teaching film history for ten years and all that time Guy-Blaché is probably the one I devote the most time to when I talk about the early days of cinema. The students seem to be impressed by what she did, without me having ever felt any need to invent things or make her out to be more than she already was.

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Here are some previous documentaries that told this allegedly untold story:
Qui est Alice Guy 1975, produced by Nicole-Lise Bernheim
The Lost Garden: The Life and Cinema of Alice Guy-Blaché (Marquise Lepage 1995)
Alice Guy ou l'enfance du cinema (Florida Sadki 1997)
Reel Models: The First Women of Film; Alice Guy, Lois Weber, Frances Marion, Dorothy Arzner (2000)
Looking for Alice (Claudia Collao 2008)

And there is a fictionalisation about her life: Elle voulait faire du Cinéma (Caroline Huppert 1983)

Here are some earlier books:
Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-2968): La première femme cinèaste du monde by Victor Bachy (1993)
Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema by Alice McMahan (2002)
Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer, edited by Joan Simon (2009)
Alice Guy, Gaumont et les débuts du film sonore by Maurice Gianati, Laurent Mannoni (2012)
Alice Guy Pionnière du cinéma by Daniel Chocron (2013)

The entry for her in Ephraim Katz's The Film Encyclopedia (1994) tells the same story too, although without mentioning all of Guy-Blaché's many siblings, children and grandchildren that take up a considerable part of Be Natural.

Georg af Klercker (1877-1951)

Defining this and that period as a "golden age" tend to get rather monotonous, as it is so common. But possibly the first period called a golden age is Swedish cinema in the late 1910s and early 1920s. On this there is some consensus. There is however no consensus about which years should be covered by it. There are at least two contenders: 1913-1924 or 1917-1924. Unfortunately, 1917-1924 seems to have the upper hand; unfortunately for Georg af Klercker.

When Swedish silent cinema is discussed it is usually about Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller, and films such as Terje Vigen (Sjöström 1917), Thomas Graal's Best Film (Stiller 1917), The Outlaw and His Wife (Sjöström 1918), The Treasure of Arne (Stiller 1919), Erotikon (Stiller 1920), The Phantom Carriage (Sjöström 1921) and The Saga of Gösta Berling (Stiller 1924). But there was a third man, frequently forgotten, and that was Georg af Klercker. One of the reasons he is not mentioned is that he had his best years 1915-1918, and then retired (sort of), and consequently he is not seen as part of the "golden age". And whereas Stiller and Sjöström were both in Stockholm at Charles Magnusson's vertically integrated company Svenska Bio, af Klercker made most of his films in Göteborg, at Hasselblad Fotografiska AB. But these are unfair reasons to keep him out of sight. If we instead keep to the wider span, 1913-1924, perhaps beginning with Sjöström's marvellous Ingeborg Holm (1913), af Klercker's oeuvre will be a natural part of that golden age. It is also a fact that initially Magnusson in 1912 hired all three of them, Stiller, Sjöström and af Klercker. They worked side by side for a few years before af Klercker left. Maybe if he had stayed on things would have been different.

He was born in Kristianstad, in the south of Sweden, in 1877 in a wealthy and aristocratic family. He enrolled in the military and became a lieutenant. and was consequently referred to as "lieutenant af Klercker" for the rest of his life, including by film critics. But he had artistic ambitions rather than military. More specifically, he had theatre ambitions, and began acting across Sweden and Finland. In 1911 af Klercker was employed by Dramaten (the Royal Dramatic Theatre) in Stockholm. It was from there that Magnusson lured him to his new studio on Lidingö, and made him head of production.

The first film af Klercker directed was as part of Magnusson and Svenska Bio's partnership with the Swedish arm of French company Pathé. Två bröder it was called and it was immediately banned by the Swedish film censorship board. His next film was The Last Performance/Dödsritten under cirkuskupolen (1912), which was released around the world and quite successfully so. It is partly lost, but what remains is not bad, and can be seen here:



He made several films in 1913 but then he became a part-time victim of the falling out between Svenska Bio and Pathé, as af Klercker was directing För fäderneslandet. It was finished in late 1913 but did not open until spring 1914, at which point af Klercker had left Svenska Bio for Pathé. He worked for them for a year and then he went to Hasselblad, where he was to get sole responsibility for the direction of their films. Hasselblad is today primarily known as a company that makes cutting edge cameras and photo equipment (popular at NASA, including on their lunar exhibitions) but it was not until 1941 they begun to manufacture by themselves. Before that they sold cameras, and for a while they also went into film production after they had began a cooperation with the distribution company Biograf AB Victoria. They called themselves Victorias Filmbyrå, and there af Klercker made almost 30 films, during a period of three years (half of them in 1916).

His films are a varied bunch, although thrillers and melodramas are the most common ones, and most of them have a very rich and evocative mise en scène and an imaginative use of deep focus. There is often an elaborate dynamic interplay between one level of action in the foreground and another level of action towards the back. (This was not unique for af Klercker but had become a recurring stylistic device at least since the early 1910s.) Working at Hasselblad gave him access to the most sophisticated cameras of the day, and he and his different cinematographers took advantage of the possibilities. But he was also good at directing actors, and with an eye for psychological realism. He also made the only Swedish film which seems to have been directly influenced by Louis Feuillade, Mysteriet natten till den 25:e (1917). It too was banned by the censors. Other highlights are Kärleken segrar (1916), I mörkrets bojor (1917) and Nattliga toner (1918).

1918 the film production unit at Hasselblad was sold off, and it merged with several other film companies. This new company was called Filmindustri AB Skandia, and it would the following year merge with Svenska Bio, becoming AB Svensk Filmindustri (SF), under the management of Nils Bouveng and Magnusson. So af Klercker might have been back working for him again, an idea which probably did not appeal to him. So instead he left filmmaking, briefly worked in the hotel business and then returned to the theatre. He left partly because he was tired of filmmaking, partly because his kind of films and filmmaking was considered old-fashioned, and it had become more difficult to sell them abroad, and to some extent because he was a victim of that era's perpetual mergers and acquisitions. But for a few years he was an equal to Sjöström and Stiller.

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In 1986 at the silent film festival at Pordenone there was a major af Klercker retrospective, and it did serve as a reminder to critics and scholars of his importance. There is also a book-length study of his films by Astrid Söderbergh Widding: Stumfilm i brytningstid - Stil och berättande i Georg af Klerckers filmer (1998).

Ingmar Bergman was a huge admirer of af Klercker and in 1995 he made a TV-film about him and Charles Magnusson, called Sista skriket/The Last Gasp. It is very good. Here is a page from the manuscript.

Two of his films that I have not seen but that look particularly intriguing are Nattens barn (1916) and Mellan liv och död (1917).

The other Vertigo - Sebald and Kafka

All the writings of W.G. Sebald are essential, and in particular the astonishing Austerlitz. Today however I will quote from Vertigo, first published in 1990. Its original German title is Schwindel. Gefühle and translated by Michael Hulse. The quotes below are from part III, "Dr. K Takes the Waters at Riva", and concerns K, who is unhappy in Verona and consoles himself with a visit to the cinema:

Perhaps it was the bills, still posted throughout the city, announcing the spettacoli lirici all'Arena that August and the word AIDA displayed in large letters which persuaded him that the Veronese show of carefree togetherness had something of a theatrical performance about it, staged especially to bring home to him, Dr K., his solitary, eccentric condition - a thought he could not get out of his head and which he was only able to escape by seeking refuge in a cinema, probably the Cinema Pathé di San Sebastiano. In tears, so Dr K. recorded the following day in Desenzano, he sat in the surrounding darkness, observing the transformations into pictures of the minute particles of dust glinting in the beam of the projector.

Dr K. is Franz Kafka and the time is the 1913, when Kafka left Prague for a trip through Italy to Switzerland, for health reasons. In Switzerland he had an affair with a young woman, before returning home again.

But let's get back to that day in Verona, where Sebald wonders what it was that Dr K. saw:

Was it the Pathé newsreel, featuring the review of the cavalry in the presence of His Majesty Vittorio Emanuele III, and La Lezione dell'abisso, which, as I discovered in the Biblioteca Civica, were shown that day at the Pathé and which are both now untraceable? Or was it, as I initially supposed, a story that ran with some success in the cinemas of Austria in 1913, the story of the unfortunate Student of Prague, who cut himself off from love and life when, on the 13th of May, 1820, he sold his soul to a certain Scapinelli? The extraordinary exterior shots in this film, the silhouettes of his native city flickering across the screen, would doubtless have sufficed to move Dr K. deeply, most of all perhaps the fate of the eponymous hero, Balduin, since in him he would have recognised a kind of doppelgänger, just as Balduin recognises his other self in the dark-coated brother whom he could never and nowhere escape.

The German film The Student of Prague opened in late August of 1913 so it is a possibility. In any event Sebald describes the story of the film, up until its melodramatic ending with a bullet in the heart of Balduin, and speculates as to why it might appeal to Dr K.:

Final contortions of this kind, which regularly occur in opera when, as Dr K. once wrote, the dying voice aimlessly wanders through the music, did not by any means seem ridiculous to him; rather he believed them to be an expression of our, so to speak, natural misfortune, since after all, as he remarks elsewhere, we lie prostrate on the boards, dying, our whole lives long.

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Allan Dwan and Jean Grémillon

This year Allan Dwan and Jean Grémillon have been getting an unusually large amount of attention, at museums, film festivals and cinematheques. Since they are both filmmakers of considerable skills and artistry this is only right and proper, and long overdue. What is also satisfying about it is that it is further evidence of what I am always arguing, namely that film history is not set in stone but must be continuously updated, reinterpreted and expanded. Neither Dwan nor Grémillon are unknown (at least not among distinguished film historians) but they are not household names either, for no apparent reason. In the silent era Dwan was one of the most esteemed and prestigious filmmakers around, and he could be seen partying with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Grémillon was celebrated by André Bazin in the 1940s. But after the widespread attention they have received of late hopefully their films will be shown with more frequency.

Dwan made hundreds of films, from 1911 to 1961, with great energy and enthusiasm, and I have seen very few of them. Only six to be exact. Three of them, Driftwood (1947), Silver Lode (1954) and Tennessee's Partner (1955) are very good, particularly the last one. They were made quickly and inexpensively, but that did not get in the way of their quality. Powerful, emotional and with excellent precision in composition and with a use of depth and framing enough to put must other films to shame. I want to explore more of his films, not least the early silent phase when he was one of the great pioneers, to be mentioned alongside other important filmmakers from the pre-1920s, such as Thomas Ince, D.W. Griffith and Cecil B DeMille.

Jean Grémillon had a shorter career; lasting between 1923 and 1958, and many of his close to 50 films were shorts and documentaries. His fiction features though are exceptional. They are intense, dramatic and raw, imbued with a romanticism and spirituality. Some of them can lazily be called French poetic realism, a much overstretched term, and at least one of them, Stormy Waters (Remorques 1941) with a script partly written by Jacques Prévert, must be regarded as one of the most impressive and wonderful French films ever made. Other personal favourites are The Love of a Woman (L'amour d'une femme 1953), his last feature film, and L'étrange Monsieur Victor (1938).

                                          An image from Stormy Waters.

I do not know these filmmakers well enough to write much more than this but below are some valuable links for those who want to read more. I will end with a quote from Bazin: "Grémillon's art is worthy of long commentaries. /.../ He expresses himself in a visual prose of an honesty and transparency so perfect that we cease to be aware of technique. At this degree of skill, art completely disappears into its subject; we are no longer at the cinema but in life itself." (The quote, from 1944, can be found in the collection of early writings by Bazin called "French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance".)

Grémillon links:
Farran Smith Nehme at Mubi.
Dave Kehr in New York Times.
An introduction from the Film Museum in Vienna.
Michael Koresky writing for Criterion.

Dwan links:
Richard Brody at the New Yorker.
The Allan Dwan Dossier.
R. Emmet Sweeney on Dwan, part 1.
R. Emmet Sweeney on Dwan, part 2.

Kevin Brownlow lecturing on Allan Dwan:
Lezione di Cinema - Alla Ricerca di Allan Dwan / Searching for Allan Dwan from Cineteca di Bologna on Vimeo.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Women

Considering today is International Women's Day I thought I highlight some women filmmakers.

Alice Guy-Blaché, with the film Falling Leaves (1912) :



Lois Weber, with a clip from Hypocrites (1915):



Dorothy Arzner, with a clip from Dance, Girl, Dance (1940):



Ida Lupino, with the whole of The Hitchhiker (1953):



Agnès Varda, with the short film Les fiancés du pont Mac Donald (1961):



Mai Zetterling, with the short film The War Game (1962):



Chantal Akerman, with a clip from Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975):



Gillian Armstrong, with a clip from High Tide (1987):



Claire Denis, with a clip from Nenette and Boni (1996):



Samira Makhmalbaf, with a clip from The Apple (1998)



Nicole Holofcener, with a clip from Lovely & Amazing (2001):



That will be enough for now. Usually I do not like to single out filmmakers based on gender, or discuss cinema in this way, but I made an exception today. I often hear complains about the lack of female role models for women who want to make films. That is nonsense. These 11 are just a tip of an iceberg.

Previously I have written about Maya Deren (here) and Nora Ephron (here, here and here).
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(I of course borrowed the title of this post from James Agee and Walker Evans.)

Missing parts

In my on-going Raoul Walsh-retrospective I yesterday saw The Big Trail, his epic western from 1930. But what exactly did I see? Well, certainly not all of it. The version I saw was a measly 105 minutes, whereas the 70mm version that was released in 1930 was at least 150 minute long. Why was the version I saw just a condensed version? And is it really accurate to say that "I've seen The Big Trail"? No. The best I can say is that "I've seen part of The Big Trail."

During the summer I once again saw Ingeborg Holm (1913), and after I learned that it, too, was shorter than it should be, with some scenes missing. So all these years I've been under the impression that I've seen the whole of it, when in fact I have seen only part of it, albeit most parts.

This might seem like a semantic discussion, but it is important, or at least should be, for film historians. New films, we might generally assume at least, are shown in their original length, if by "original" we mean the length the makers of it intended for it to have. But old films, perhaps especially "silent" films, might just as well be shorter than they once were, due to wear and tear, or the scissors of censors, or other things that have interfered with the print. And this is of course relevant because the impact that a given film has on the viewer, the interpretations that are done, the emotional response the film arouse, might be very much different were those missing scenes there. The viewer might get a completely false impression of the film. This is perhaps not the case with Ingeborg Holm, but it most certainly is the case with The Big Trail. The restored version, in its widescreen glory (or Fox Grandeur as it was called), which was released on DVD in the US two years ago, is still only 122 min. When and where will I be able to see the real thing?

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When talking about new films, I'm not forgetting the common occurrence of films to appear, soon after their cinema release, on DVD in "the director's version" or something like that. But that's another story.

More from me on Ingeborg Holm here: http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/search?q=ingeborg+holm

More early British cinema

In a previous posting I shared some great examples of early British cinema with you. And now I want to advertise the upcoming British Silent Film Festival. It's between 15th and 18th of April, in Leicester.

Here's a link:

http://www.britishsilents.co.uk/silent/

Early British cinema

During the first years of cinema, France, the US and the UK were the leading lights. From France, famously, came the Lumiere brothers as well as Georges Méliès. From America came among others Thomas Edison (sometimes referred to as "the thug") and Edwin S. Porter. But the British pioneers are not as well-known generally as their colleagues on the continent or in New York. So here are some names and some films from Britain.

Just look at this early gem, from 1899:

Around the same time came Mitchell & Keynon, the filmmaking team of Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon. They made films all over the place, both documents of life and more fictional things such as slapstick, as well as dramatisations of actual events. They were re-discovered in the middle of 1990s, and a DVD release is available. (Can be bought here)

An important filmmaker was also James Williamson who did experimental stuff such as this film, called The Big Swallow, in 1900:

And of course, there was the wonderful Rescued By Rover from 1905, directed by Lewin Fitzhamon, for Cecil Milton Hepworth's production company. Hepworth and his company were among the most inventive in early cinema. (The acting by the humans here may not be the best, but the dog is great.)



But I've saved the best for last, also from Cecil Milton Hepworth, here's The Explosion of a Motor Car, from 1900. Enjoy!