Alice Guy and the early days of cinema
Jan. 30th, 2010 11:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
Sur la barricade (1907) - Street fighting men
Guy's earliest films seem similar to me to what little else I've seen from that era. Some of the them feature trick photography à la Georges Méliès, and some are "actualities" in the form of little snippets of daily life or nature. These early films generally last only a minute or two. However there are also some early attempts at narrative. The 1907 film On the Barricade is set during the French Revolution. A young man heads out of the house to get some milk for his mother. Along the way, he witnesses a battle on the street between revolutionaries and royal troops. He is captured by the troops, who line him up against a wall to execute him. He pleads with them to allow him to deliver the milk to his mother, and promises to return. He's as good as his word, and upon his return, the troops set him against the wall once again. His mother, however, has followed him and throws herself in front of the guns and begs for his release. The officer relents and lets him go.
One of the notable things about this little film, aside from it's dramatic narrative, is that much of it is shot on location, although the house is a typical set with painted backdrops forming the walls.
Sur la barricade (1907) - "Spare the life of my child!"
There's also a satire called The Results of Feminism (Les résultats du féminism, 1906) in which roles of men and women are reversed. From what little I've seen so far, it does appear that Guy had an interest in cross-dressing and gender reversal, although I'm not sure to what purposes she put it. Also notable is an early sound film from 1905, which consists of someone singing a song called "Lilas blancs" ("White Lilacs"). I'm unclear on what sound technology was used, but it's evidence that experiments with sound film started very early.
In some ways the most interesting of her films of the ones in this collection that I've watched so far is The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ (La vie du Christ, 1906). What's immediately striking is that it's over 30 minutes long. My knowledge of this era of film-making isn't great, but this seems extraordinarily long to me. By 1910 the reel had become the basic unit of film, and one reel lasted for roughly 10 minutes. Thus you see many 10 minute adaptations of famous literary works such as Frankenstein and She in 1910 and 1911. It's not until 1913 that multiple-reel features really arrive on the scene. What's not clear to me is whether the reel was the unit for La vie du Christ. Its structure is twenty-some short scenes of a minute or so, which is the typical length of the short films of the 1890s and early oughts. Was this film just a string of these shown one after the other?
La vie du Christ (1906) - The Last Supper
The other thing that's striking about this movie is the production design. The sets are much more elaborate than in the other Guy films in this collection, and even when they are still basically just a painted backdrop, the paintings themselves are much more elaborate. The scenes in this movie were apparently based on the illustrations from the James Tissot bible, at least according to an excellent overview of Guy's life and work at ArtDaily. I've read elsewhere that films based on the life of Christ were very common in this era and tended to play in venues other than the nickelodeons that were springing up in the thousands at the time.
There are no explanatory intertitles, only chapter titles giving a name for the scene. Apparently there would have been live narration at showings of the film. While I'm familiar enough with the story to understand most of the scenes, there are a couple that I don't remember from the gospels in the Bible. One involves someone named Saint Veronica, who wipes Christ's face as he carries the cross through the streets of Jerusalem. We see her holding up the cloth afterwards, and -- mirabile dictu -- it bears an imprint of Christ's face!
La vie du Christ (1906) - Saint Veronica
Learn something new every day. I've still got a lot to learn about the origins of film, and this set is another step in the education.