Le jardin oublié: La vie et l'oeuvre d'Alice Guy-Blaché (1995)

User Rating:

6.9/10   

Director:

Marquise Lepage

Writers:

Solange Collin (writer)
Marquise Lepage (writer)

Genre:

Documentary | Biography

Plot:

The story of forgotten silent filmmaker Alice Guy and her more than 700 films. |

Plot Keywords:

Film Making

Cast

Alice Guy	...	Herself (archive footage)
Adrienne Blaché-Channing	...	Herself (granddaughter of Alice Guy)
Roberta Blaché	...	Herself (daughter-in-law of Alice Guy)
André Gaudreault	...	Himself (Université de Montréal)
Alison McMahan	...	Herself
Nicolas Seydoux	...	Himself (Gaumont)
Anthony Slide	...	Himself (historian)
Alan Williams	...	Himself (historian)
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Claudine Chatel	...	Simone Blaché (English version) (voice)
Anne Dorval	...	Alison McMahan (voice)
Françoise Faucher	...	Simone Blaché / Alice Guy-Blaché (English version) (voice)
Kathleen Fee	...	Adrienne Blaché-Channing (voice)
Jean-René Ouellet	...	Alan Williams (voice)
Kelly Ricard	...	Roberta Blaché (voice)
Paul Savoie	...	Anthony Slide (voice)
Kim Yaroshevskaya	...	Olga Petrova (voice)

Also Known As:

The Lost Garden (Canada: English title) (short title)
The Lost Garden: The Life and Cinema of Alice Guy-Blaché (Canada: English title)

Runtime:

53 min

Country:

Canada | UK | France | Belgium | USA

Language:

French

Color:

Black and White | Color

Company:

National Film Board of Canada (NFB)

Movie Connections:

Features Questions indiscrètes (1906)

A charming and creative woman

This documentary is about Alice Guy, the FIRST woman director. Starting in clerical work at the French studio, Gaumont, she quickly saw that so much more could be done with film. Previously cinema was limited to static, documentary street-shots. Alice had the vision to create and stage fictional drama. Before there was even the title of "film-maker", she'd begun to develop the language of cinema. Gaumont assigned her to run ALL of its production work. She was the only woman director in the world for 17 years.

Gaumont beat Hollywood by 20 years to matching sound and image, doing MTV-like filmed songs, sound synchronized with images-- color images. This was in the earliest years of the 20th century. Her studio sent Alice Guy to New York with the complicated process. The technology may not have gone over with the public, but she certainly did. She was highly-publicized in the American press and became heavily involved with the early American cinema-- pre-Hollywood.

But since then the woman has been entirely overlooked by the history books. Even at the time, much of her work was attributed to assistants or people who weren't involved at all. This documentary also described her efforts to find old copies or references to her films. Even in advanced years, she was very charming and sharp and alive. Alice Guy died in 1968 at the age of 95.