Alice Guy and the early days of cinema

La vie du Christ (1906) - The Ascension

I recently picked up Kino's set of Gaumont Treasures 1897-1913, which collects films by three early directors at Gaumont -- a French film studio founded in 1895 and still in existence today, making it the oldest surviving studio. The three directors are Alice Guy, Louis Feuillade, and Léonce Perret, who were also all three the head of production at the studio at various points. I'd previously seen films by Guy and Feuillade (who is famous for his thriller serials of the Teens such as Fantomas and Les Vampires), but I'd never even heard of Perret before this collection came out.

Alice Guy is known as the first woman director, but she was also one of the first directors period, with a career that started in 1896. She was Gaumont's first head of production from 1896 to 1907, after which she moved with her husband to the US and founded a studio called Solax, first in New York and then in the studio town of Fort Lee, New Jersey. When Solax failed in 1914, she worked as an independent director in Hollywood until 1920, after which she could no longer find work in film, even back in France. One of the films of hers I'd seen before is a delicate melodrama called The Ocean Waif, which she made in Hollywood in 1916.

( More below the cut, including more stills )