Alice Guy

a spark in the collective imagination. Alice Kie, the first and for seventeen years only female film director, shot her first picture, a fantasy landscape with babies coming out of cabbages. She wanted to be known as the first female film director, and she was. The Lumier Brothers projected their first motion picture on the Wall in and she started in. My name is Janelle Dietrick, and I've been researching Alice Ki Blache for about seven years and I've written four books

about her, now five. She did the first actual story film, which is ridiculous in a minute to do a story. I mean, now you are used to it. You watched the commercials on TV and it's incredible, what a story they can tell in thirty seconds or a minute. But nobody thought you could do it, and that changed the landscape. Alice ki Lepronier firm Cinea Still moont Well. Alice's career has been documented before, the details of her life had largely gone unchecked by historians. I think she was made

into an icon and that just flattened her out. It's been hard for people looking through twenty century eyes or century eyes to see her as a person. If you say she was the first woman director and she directed a thousand films, you're really taking her out of context, because today the director is like really important that he's got all the status films or two hours long or you know, a series or whatever. But what she was doing was like a minute, and she did everything, the scenes,

the costumes. Wow, how did anybody ever do that? Well? She started in the beginning. Permit me to present to you the one who has filled my life entirely, my own Prince Chreming the cinema. He is an elderly gentleman. As you shall see. What got me started is trying to fill in the gaps in her memoirs. Oh, they are so short, there's like a hundred sixty pages. They're beautiful, but they're cryptic. I have often been asked why I chose so unfeminine a career. Yet I have not chosen

this career, no doubt. My destiny was traced before my birth, and I have merely followed a will whose name I do not know, strange fate which I shall try to recount for you. Writing in her eighties, Alice began her retrospective with the emigration of her parents, Mariobert and emil Key. She says in her memoirs an aunt and uncle of her mother's had immigrated to South America, and that had led to her parents marriage, which was arranged. And I

wanted to know why Alice's father went to Chili. There were revolutions all over Europe, and one third of the foreigners who came to the California Goldish were French. Most people don't realize that there are towns in California. They are called like French. Correct. The American said, yeah, we want to go for ourselves, so they kicked the foreigners out. My claim, I just take it out. I don't have a proof that he came from France to California to Chile.

But it makes sense that he would have because that's what people did who approached the latitude of Santiago. The short towns become increasing. They have a host of Europeans in the New World ended up in the luxurious Chilean port city of Valparaiso. In Valparaiso, they had a international community. There were a lot of Germans, a lot of French, a lot of English. They all have their own hospitals and their own newspapers. Alice's uncle had a soap factory.

He was very successful. I think they probably made candles, to which you can imagine everybody needed candles and soap. I think he bought in Melgi that bookstore in Valpariso as part of Alice's mother's dowry. As Janelle writes, the ninete century publisher was often editor, printer, bookseller, banker, and marketing director. Alice's childhood would for a time be full of books. In order that one of her children be French. My numerous brothers and sisters had all been born in Chile.

My mother had valiantly endured a sea voyage of seven weeks. That's I also accomplished my first voyage between Valporriso and Paris. It was not to be my last. Her first four years she was with her grandmother in Geneva or Carug actually, which is a suburb of Geneva. Grown there was not wealthy yet in her tiny home. Despite our age differences,

everyone was her joy. We gathered around her table, where we enjoyed the cherry soup perfumed with wine and cinnamon or cheese she lovingly served in a bowl of cream. She told us legends of her native broom and sang to us in her admirable voice, a song from her youth. Those were very happy and idyllic for her. But then her mother came and got her, and her mother was a stranger, so it was like a stranger kidnapping in

the railroad station. My poor grandmother wept. I cried too, and through a tantrum, but the departure signal hastened our separation. Drunk with tears, I slept. At last, her mother, whom she didn't remember or no, came and just took her away and took her to Chili. The boat ride it was like what six weeks, seven weeks, seven weeks, because they had to go around the horn. There was no

Panama canaliot of this voyage. I have kept few memories, the long gold ribbon that the moon unrolled to the horizon, the phosphorescency, the fine fish, my own baptism on crossing the equator. I think that was traumatic. It kind of happened to her again. Two years later. She met her father for the first time when she was fourth, But her father brought her back to France when she's six and puts her in the convent, so she had that

family separation trauma twice. I think it was something that formed her artistically, because she had to find fantasy and ways to tolerate that kind of trauma. I was enrolled as a student at the Convent of the Sacred Heart at v on the Swiss border. I was six years old. After those two years of sun and gaiety, I seem to have entered the world of the night birds. The black clad nun who received me made me mountain to send stairways traversed long vaulted, dark corridors. The silence was absolute,

the cold penetrating. The methods used were without softness. For the smallest defenses, there were long periods of kneeling arms crossed in an icy corridor for braver sins, a cell and dry bread and water. It was an international school. The religious community there had schools in different countries Italy, England, and so they could just rotate the kids and they could learn different languages. Her older sisters were there and she knew them from her first four years prusion. But

they kept the kids apart. That's one of the ways they raised kids. They didn't want them to form attachments with each other. The parents also devoided too much attachment to the kids because you know, half the kids died. There were no antibiotics. The birth rate was low, and then the survival rate was not great. Childhood was very difficult in the nineteenth century. Enforced silence was really hard on them. They just didn't tolerate noise. They let him

out to play for like half an hour. I don't think they fed them enough. It just was very severe. They had to sell a lot, work a lot, pray a lot, you know, no nonsense, so I'm sure it was hard for all of them. In Paris, of the women worked in service as maids or laundresses. The other worked in the needle trades sewing, so what they learned at the convent was to sew. Never forget. We had

an order of workers that was considered useful skill. Then if you did get married, then you still needed to sew. The myth is that women didn't work until after the nineties. Women always had to work, you know, they just didn't get paid a lot and didn't have a good job. Work them hard. Remember, the superior of all is a sudden of all. I understand. The hard realities of the convent were contrasted against the sweeping beauty of the surrounding scenery.

The disney castles were all found from around there that sparks of child's imagination. In Switzerland, they had a lot of myths, fairies, little gnomes in the ground, a fog that would come up and be an apparition. People falling off the cliff were pushed by a dwarf you know, or something you know. So I think it was like a land of stories. She thrived on the stories, as most kids do, but more particularly her. I think they

separated from her parents. It must be magic. Her dad came and got her out of the convent because he couldn't afford it anymore. First, he moved to a less expensive convent, and then came and got her, and they were all in Paris together in those years. She said they were in reduced circumstances. Though Alice would not describe the tragedy of her father's life, she would later elaborate on similar themes and her films. She did a screen play, or what they call them scenarios back then, of a

gambler that gambled too much and had a problem. I think it was about her father. She had said, Well, scenarios about that. I have another drink. I think that's one of the problems he had. And they did that a lot in California and in Chile. Gambling was it. She had three older sisters and an older brother. Her older brother was thirteen when he died in eighty, and her father died in and then a sister also died in two. From a family of seven, they were down

to four. In Alice's memoir, she covers that in paragraph she doesn't tell you the dates, not a lot of details. Another man five years older than her father, became an important figure in her life, famous engineer Alexander Gustave Eiffel. To understand Alice, it's important to know a little about Eiffel. I think she knew him before her father died. I think he was a friend of her father's. He solved

a lot of problems in engineering. Bridges that carried the train across rivers, and skyscrapers they say were built based on his calculations. The Statue of Liberty was taller than any building in New York at the time, and that's a structure holding that up that he designed. So he had a whole career of building bridges, public works. Mostly to do public works, he had to get along with everybody. He'd been on projects all over the world. He built

things in South America, Asia, Europe. He had to know those people, socialized with those people, get along with those people, do a good job on the last project he did. He had to be in with the people who had the purse to get those jobs. Eifel went to Chili in seventy two, the year before Alice was born. They all talk in South America about bridges that Eiffel may have done in Chile, and they're going like, we can't find any of that. We really can credit him with

what he did as a bread and butter thing. I mean, he had big bridges and big projects. But his business he developed these portable bridges. They were like kits, so he would ship the prefabricated parts to South America and then people could build their own. I saw a bridge that looked like one of his bridges in Chile, but it's got this other guy's name on it. I'm going like, yeah, but that's how they did it, you know, they got the kit and then they put it together. He had

built forty bridges. Then in the eighties he started building the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower was a culmination of his engineering career that they called him an artist after he built affe tower. The newspaper Le Figaro had an office in the Eiffel Tower, so they covered him pretty regularly. If he did something or went to something charitable, or attended a funeral or whatever, they wrote it down. So

he was famous. But then he had a scandal. In eighteen seventy nine, he was at a conference talking about building the Panama Canal. The guy that built the Panama Canal built the Suez Canal, and so everybody trusted him to build the Panama Canal. But the Suez Canal was sea level. Panama canal had to go over a mountain for fifty miles. They were just going to dig through that mountain. And everybody believed that this guy could do

it because he had done the Suez Canal. So they all threw their money in and he couldn't do it. It just was impossible with the equipment they had been maybe they could do it now. Eiffel and French engineers recommended another route. He had developed the locks, and they're like giant bathtub that you fill up with water and the boats go up one side of the Istmas and down the other. There's like ten locks. He designed that

and they actually used his design. The French tried to build it until the Americans picked it up in nineteen o four and finished it in nineteen fourteen, and it was completed the same day World War One started, so there was like no celebration. The French effort failed, not because of a flaw on design, but because the funding fell through, with no canal and no payback on their investment. The public was outraged. The Eiffel was only a contractor. His name was at the center of the controversy and

the public just hated him. He would probably like Bernie Mudoff or something. Back then, he wasn't so popular like he is now in mythology. The Panama Canal scandal effectively ended his engineering career, just as the career of the first female filmmaker was about to begin. In her memoirs and later to TV cameras, Alice described the great romance of her life to a man she never named. In print, Alice refers to this mysterious figure like cryptic initials. Peeb

must have been seventy years old at that epoch. I was seventeen, but I was literally in love with him. Every Thursday evening was a party from me. We passed those evenings in Peeb's home with his two daughters. I sat close to him, my hand and his while his two daughters served tea or played music, and my mother knitted or embroidered. Janelle thinks that man was efful. Piecing their two biographies together is the subject of Janelle's book, Alice and Eiffel, a New History of early Cinema and

the love story Kept Secret first century. He was married and had five kids, and his wife died in seven and he never remarried. He didn't have a woman in his life for forty five years, but he was like the most eligible bachelor in Europe. There was this corresponding gap in his life, same as her. She had this gap of no boyfriend until she was thirty three, and she's a beautiful woman and you're gonna I don't know about that, you know. And then he has the same gap,

like nobody knows what he was doing. He wasn't doing the Panama Canal. He was out of his business. So once I put them together, then the chore was, well, what evidence is there that they had a relationship. It's mostly based on her words, because she was still talking about it when she was ninety. People expect one piece of evidence to prove everything. They call it the smoking gun, which is just a myth. There's no such thing. He never or find a smoking gun that would be catching

somebody red handed. I like to say, each piece of evidence has its own unique value. Never know what it's going to be in the end. In a few months after the death of a meal Key, a private company was formed to combat one of the greatest threats facing nineteenth century France, infant mortality. Eiffel knew everybody who founded Mutah to Maternelle, where her mother worked right after her father died. He wasn't one of them, He wasn't an officer,

but he knew all those people. They were his friends. Her mother worked there for a while, but then she had to quit for some reason. I think they stopped paying her. Why else would she quit. Alice had to learn a way to make a living. A family friend told her mother that she should take stenography and typing. I think that was Ifel. It was Pepe who advised my mother to have me take typing and stenography lessons,

a science quite new in those days. You should have almost no movement in your wrists and forearms, she said. Her teacher was a stenographer from the Chamber of Deputies. Well, he knew all them too, R F four, hey, I, hey nine, D E J and and so forth. If you take your twenty century eyes and go oh, she was a secretary. Well now people say things like, just as secretary, I would say, Hi, Joe, I understand you're

gonna be helping us out here. Yes, man. Secretaries were men because they were the protege that owner of the business is right hand. Mann was do Nelson. That's my first John, I had a picture of stenographers and dred and there's all these men and two women. That's it. It was very prestigious. The afternoon mail just came in. You think you can handle in? Oh yeah. World War One came along and the men had to go to woll Are and women pretty much took over that job.

We are still short millions of hands, we must call upon women. And then once the job gets feminized, it gets associated with women, then men don't want that job. The same thing happened in reverse with stewardesses today joined me on board. Women only worked on the airplanes serving cokes. Then men start to get the job and the wages tripled just because of the status from men doing a job. The government's policy is that women should get the same

pay that men get or similar work. First secretarial job was at a Barnish factory in March. She gets the job at let's not go mind yet. It's called the Comptoire General the Photography. The camera shop where Alice would get her start, would in fact be purchased by Eiffel shortly after she was hired. Eiffel knew the former owner, who was Felix max ra Shard, and the other former owner, who was Joseph Bellow. He knew both of them for

years before the company changed hands. In Felix Max Ras Shard had been sued by his brother for a non competition agreement that he had signed. The brothers were in partnership of Shard Prayers, which was the scientific instruments. Felix Max Ras Shard built a weather station on top of the Eiffel Tower and he got a award for it from the Region of Honor and not made his brother mad. The other brother, Jules were Shard, sued Felix Max Ras

Shard for buying a camera shop. That camera shop had already existed, and then in late the court ruled against Felix Max Ras Shard and said, yeah, you can't have a camera shop. Camera is a precision instrument. They ruled against him and he appealed in the fall of took a year and a half for that decision to come down. So Felix Max for Sharon is waiting to hear if

he's gonna win his appeal or not. He approached Eiffel and Eiffel said, get someone to manage the compto our general to photography, and that's when leon go Mont was hired. Alice was also hired about the same time. Leon go Mont started March first, that's his contract, has a written contract, and I think Alice started that month because the advertising changed to be more appealing to women. You don't have to be embarrassed to take a clumsy camera on your vacation.

You can just get this little camera and they'll sit in with your outfit. So I think she was there March, just within a few weeks of when Gomont was there. The Court of Appeal didn't render their decision until May, and that's when Eiffel fellow, So they're following in Biziniar and then Godmant wanted to get in on it. They bought the company and formed a partnership of four partners that was called el See. Because Eiffel was still in scandal even in December ninety four, they were thinking of

stripping his medals away. He had all these Legion of Honor medals and there we should take those away from him. He was still having to lay low. Shaman would largely take the credit. He has some responsibility for creating his own image as the inventor, the genius Mr Gamant. He's the brilliant inventor that started everything. I think he just nosed his way in there. He was more just a businessman that watched everybody and made sure they did their job.

He was harsh. He was a harsh employer. If Leon Gomant's role in the history of motion pictures has been exaggerated over time, Eiffel's contributions have been chronically understated. Nobody knew about his years at Gaumont. They figured, well, he's just a rich guy that invested money. What they call a silent partner. Sit down and they get you out comfortable. They wait in a moment. Actually he was president. Please. The assumption is, well, if you're rich, why would you work.

But working on motion pictures was interesting. He had always he was taking pictures in the eighteen seventies. Back then they were developing in themselves, and his friends were like Jules Jansen, who did the first motion picture of an eclipse, and then Mary who did sequential photography ten years later. He was friends with him, so he was there at the beginning. We showed them how easy the camera was

to use. I knew almost nothing of this art. I had to familiarize myself with the sizes of plates, the variety of papers, the chemical products, the different camera names, the qualities focus, thanks, shutters, etcetera. Happily I learned quickly it was a camera manufacturer and cameras back then, most of you just had professionals taking pictures. But the compt Our General to Photography was advertised as photography for amateurs, and they gave classes every day, every day for free.

The way he explained that it doesn't seem too hard, like two hours, come down and learn how to use a camera, how to develop the film. You know, it wasn't just click and shoot. You had to set your shutters and load the camera, all kinds of things that you don't have to do anymore. And it sets the lens by itself too, so you're always ready for the next picture instantly. And then developing the film you had to buy chemicals and learn how to build a dark room.

They turned out great, wonderful color too. I think she probably taught that because she said she had to learn all about the plates and the papers and the chemicals, so I think she probably had to teach that class. They're probably other people doing it as well, but that was probably one of the things she had to do, which would have prepared her for them doing more with the camera. One day in March of Augustine, Louis Lumier

stopped by the shop to see Gomont. The Gomont company bought their chemicals or papers from Luliers, so they had a connection there and Gomont became good friends with the Luniers. They came to invite him to attend a mean of the Street Nationale where the two brothers would present new camera of their invention. I was present at the interview and they invited me also, but they refused to give us any explication of their instrument. You'll see. They said,

it's a surprise. They had done motion pictures, but they were all you know, looked through a little viewer and one person sees it DEMONI had one now was just a disc that you roll, so it was very limited to what you could see on the discs be like eighteen pictures on the disc and then you just turn it and you'd see the moving picture. But the loomire has put it on a roll of film then projected on the wall, and it just astounded everybody. March, they

showed it to their professional peers. First they had several other showings in June, and then in December they had the first screening for the public, and the public was totally woud just to see people on the wall or on the screen larger than life. It was astonishing at the beginning. We're so used to it, but we're still

very thrown by images. I think images are powerful. They had been created a little laboratory for the development and printing of short shots parades, station's portraits of the laboratory personnel, which served as demonstration films. But we're both brief and repetitious. Daughter of an editor. I had read a good deal and retained quite a bit. I had done amateur theatricals, and I thought that one might do better than these

demonstration films. Gathering my courage, I timidly proposed to Gorman that I might write one or two little scenes and have a few friends performing them. Yeah, yeah, that's silly, But go ahead if you if you like so, on your own time. If the future development of motion pictures had been foreseen at this time, I should never have obtained his consent. My youth, my inexperience, my sex all

conspired against me. I was given an unused terrace with an asphalt floor, which made it impossible to set up a real scene in shaky glass ceiling overlooking a vacant law. It was in this palace that I made my first efforts. A backdrop painted by a fan painter and fantasist from the neighborhood, made a vague decor with rows of wooden

cabbages cut out by a carpenter. Costumes rented here and there around the Porte Saint Marcain as actors, my friends, a screaming baby, an anxious mother leaping to and fro into the camera focus, and my first film, La Fiacho was born. I should exaggerate if I told you it was a masterpiece, but the public bend was not jaded. The actors were young and pleasing, and the film had enough success that I was allowed to try again. Version of La fiare scho, like so many early films, is

now lost. Historians still quibble with whether this film actually existed, suggesting ms Key simply misremembered. Even in her posthumously published memoirs, there is an asterisk disputing this claim. But Alice held firm on this point, and you think she'd remember she remade La fier Schou In nineteen two. Janelle has an entire book on the subject, Lafia Shou Alice Key's Garden of Dreams. In this business, you're just happy to find

a fragment. I would love to just have a fragment of the first Laftio shoe, and it may be found somewhere sometime. Alice described as having a honeymoon couple a farmer. They go out to find a baby in the cabbage patch, and they asked the farm. When the farmacists go ahead and they look for babies and they find a baby. There was no fairy in Alice's scenario. There's a lot out of cabbage patch baby postcards from that period. There

are babies in the cabbages, but there's no fairy. Alice says, the mother of the baby kept jumping into the field of focus to tend the baby. So I think it just happened that the mother became the fairy. That one minute of film costs like eight days of her salary, so you know, she wasn't like, well, let's just do it over. It was thought for a long time that was a copy of the one is just a single.

The fairy is picking up babies out of the cabbages, and then there's another one called Sage Fem Premier Class midwife, first class. Alice hated that title. Later on, she said, I would never have called it that. I found it in the newspaper when it came out in nineteen o two, it was called a Fao shoot, but Gomant I think uged the name because in the later catalogs that's called Sam the premiere class. And the third one, honeymoon couple

goes to a baby market. It's like a garden that's a market, and they look at seven or eight babies and then they pick one. So that's completely different from the first one and the second one. They're all three different, but she called them all lafo shoe. A play does a production, it's called the same thing every time, but every time they produce a play, they make changes, new actors, new costumes, new set. They put their own spin on it.

I think that's what she was thinking. She's just like, yeah, they're all ufo shoe, but they're different iterations of the same idea. Back then, films weren't the main feature, you know, they were only a minute long. They were just side shirts. You showed films in the store you pay nickel and just see the film for a minute, or they showed him at the fair, just had people in and out seeing the same film. You know, they didn't have theaters to show movies in. There were theaters for plays, but

there weren't theaters from movies. And it was a one minute format, so it's like, what are you gonna do with that? I think fo shoot was paired with a play called Lommie Fritz. Lommie Fritz was called the National novel because it was about Franceny day, France had a really terrible birth rate and infant mortality rate. It's just a romance. Older bachelor doesn't want to get married, but he meets this young woman and they fall in love and finally, in the end of the play they kiss

and they're engaged, or they hug and they're engaged. That's the end of the play. That play had been playing in Paris for twenty years, so it's like a classic. It's like the Nutcracker. People would go see it from summer to Christmas, and they played it on Christmas Day. You're not the reference I have in a newspaper puts them in the same paragraph lomm Me Fritz and this wonderful chromo landscape of babies being pulled out of cabbages to have it paired with a very famous play, and

it hit on a national theme. After seeing the couple apart the whole play, and then they get together at the end, but they don't get married, they don't have a baby. This little film about the honeymoon couple finding a baby in a patch. I'm sure it was just wonderful. Eiffel was good friends with the administrator of the comedy front Stays, and that's where I think they showed it it. She was still doing office work, but when they saw that the first film made money, they let her do

more films. She was making films from on. She was in charge of production at Gramont from six She was over at the studio more than at the office. They were about five miles apart, and that was a long trip, you know, enforcing buggy. She ended up moving up close to the studio. But it was all experimental. They didn't know what they were doing, which makes it so much fun.

Every Monday we discussed the week's work together. The studio became a hive of activity, that's what we made a series of comic films, pursuits, tumbles, clashes, acrobatics, what one calls slapstick. They started with chase scenes with dogs loose on his leash and upsets of baby carriage and everybody chases the dog. That's kind of thing. She used some acrobats. They do these clown like scenes where they fall and they climb and they drop in two. The Gaumont company

also developed an earlier method of sync sound. The chronophone, used a turntable and switchboard to synchronize a recorded disc with the film strip. She started doing scenes from the opera in different plays, just scenes with the musical number that was recorded separately. The actor's with lip sync at while they played recording. I think it was exciting. They were just looking for new ideas all the time that

the public was so hungry for everything. Everybody wanted something new every week, so they just had to keep producing. And then the film technology got better. It went from one minute to five minutes to twelve minutes, and then they started doing, you know, three reels of fifteen minutes each that was like a feature length. They were all in competition with each other looking for a novelties to

make their work stand out. It was while working at Goma that Alice was introduced to a certain young Englishman. Herbert Blasch had been working for the London Goldmont branch since nineteen at least in nineteen o six, he comes to Paris. Alice's cameraman was sick and she had to go to the south of France to do this film called Murray, which was a Nobel Prize winning poem and opera. Herbert Blasch a got a sign to go with her, learned the camera and all that, so they went to

the south of France. It was romantic, the story was romantic, the place was romantic. But when he went home, she's that I've never thought i'd see him again. But then Gomant sent her to Berlin, where he had gone to help with clients of Gomants. There. She spent some weeks with him there in Berlin, he asked her to marry him there and she said, I have to think about it.

Every man I talked to you says that means no. They did end up getting married about nine months later in March, and one of her interviews somebody asked her, so you got married because Gomant sent you to the US, and she said no, I was married, and then he sent us to the US two months later, three days married. I left my family and my country with a heavy heart, persuaded that I was abandoning my fine Mattie forever. We arrived in New York at four o'clock in the morning.

The view of Liberty light in the world, the side of skyscrapers, and the fog could not chase my sadness. I saw all that through tears, which I tried in vain to stop. All around me, I heard exclamations and enthusiasm in a language of which I understood not one word. Alison Herbert were sent to Cleveland to hawk the company's chronophone technology. Gomant wasn't in the US yet. The US was making movies, and Gomant was going to try to sell his synchronized sound theaters in the US. They did

sell something, but that wasn't successful. Then he had Herbert set up an office in New York. The first Godmont office opened in New York. They're trying to sell into strident films, but then the Edison Trust starts. Thomas Edison, an aasty businessman, set up the motion Picture Patents Company a k a. The Trust to ruthlessly sue manufacturers, distributors, and exhibitors of films that did not license trust the equipment and pay the MPCC fees. It seems illegal, and

it was. My husband was anti trust lawyer. I said, why do they monopolize? He goes to crush the competition. That is what they're there for, crushing the competition. Everything they do is to crush it. All these film businesses were startups, all the film companies. There were probably a hundred film companies and Edison got it down to like five.

He was put out of business finally by the court in n but he did so much damage before that, creating a business environment where they couldn't work, where they couldn't produce, where they couldn't sell their product to theaters. Had a camera that was patented that was different than Edison's, so he could have sold his camera to independence and carved out his own market. Instead of doing that, he tried to get in the Trust and they just dangled him for two or three years and then they cut

him off. Janelle thinks that Alice was working during this time, but across the board of early cinema. It's hard to track people's filmographies. There wasn't credits and movies then, right, And you know why, painters who had long educations learning how to paint like photographs so in photography came in. They didn't think photography was art. He said the machine did it. You know, the camera did the work. So they didn't give photographers credit at first. That carried over

into movies. It's like, the camera did it. You didn't do it, You just pointed the camera. It took a long time to give them credit. Studying this early period in movie history is right with complications. The films are often fragmented, damaged or lost, and almost entirely uncredited, sometimes misattributed. The best insight is often from the fledgling trade journals of the time, which printed synopsis of the newest films. The audience wasn't expected to get it from the film.

They would already know the story because say they were doing a story everybody knew, or they would publish the story in a magazine in the month before the film came out, so people would read the story before they saw the film. Ironically, the day Alice left France, moving picture World was started in New York. Their first issue, it's like sixteen pages. I think in the first issue they say, Okay, if you're in the movie business, just send us what you got and we'll put it in.

It was really advertising. It was really the movie business reporting on what they were doing. And so it had a few synopsis in it, and it was just you know, add and we're selling this, and we're selling that, and we're working on this, and it just expanded until I think in the h each issue was like a hundred fifty pages. Janelle's book, Illuminating Moments the Films of Alice ki Blache organizes the write ups of seven hundred and twenty five productions. I had typed up all her synopsis

to her scenarios because I thought that was important. Even if all you have is a title, you have something, You have something to research. She did songs in movies, she did poems, she did children's stories, novels, plays, operas, so you have something to look at that tells you something about her and her time. Many people who have never set foot in the studio before and perhaps even since then, believe that we used to work without scenarios.

Nothing could be more false except for the earliest films twenty or twenty five ms. Everything was prepared in advance, the story written with care, the cast decor, the costumes repaired in detail and distributed at each shooting. Otherwise, how could we have avoided going down and disorder? Even if we didn't have a script, girl line that actually was your line to Gomant studio was not being used. Alice said, well, maybe I can use the studio and make some films.

So she started making films there in She had a two year old by then. July thirty one, nineteen eleven, Alice and Herbert went to Europe. There's a picture of them at Eiffel's lake house in Viva, Switzerland, and they're both there and Alice was really happy. Then Herbert comes back to New York on a different ship, so that's weird. So they were separated for like sixteen days, and then she came back to New York. She talks to the trade journal and says, well, I'm going to improve the

Gomant studio. Gomant owned that studio. Eiffel was part of Gomont. I think she went to Eiffel to say, you know, can you help improve the Goldmant studio in New York. It would have been his studio, but I think he did give her some money to invest in her own studio. Alison Herbert founded their own company and called it so Lax, the logo a son on the horizon. Less than two years later, she had built her own studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey. She had been through building a studio in

Paris because Gomont built a huge studio. She witnessed that studio being built. She probably had something to do with that too, so she knew what she wanted. So Lax was the biggest fanciest studio of its time, full of state of the art technology, a removable ceiling, multiple stages, one made of glass, wide gardens for exterior shooting, a laboratory on the premises, costume and set fabrication departments with expansions being added all the time. Their films were made

on Bell and Howe cameras with Eastman Kodak film. It had everything. It was like her fantasy studio. She said it cost a hundred thousand dollars to build. She later said that she got fifty thousand dollars, which was a million too in profit sharing, but there was no profit sharing at Gomant. It was a four partner partnership. They didn't incorporate until janu seven, and she left in March nineteen o seven. The truth is she only had a hundred shares of Golmont stock, so she didn't get fifty

grand for a hundred shares. Just call it profit sharing. You were in on it. It's yours. That's what I think happened. Okay, here is set. It's so lacks. Alice no longer had anyone to report to but herself. The decision of what to make and the burden of how to finance were hers alone. These are the programs that America listens to. In her own company, she did three films. A lot of them were the shorter version five twelve minutes, but she had twenty or twenty five feature length films.

She wrote most of those two she bought some, but why should she? She she found it easy to write, so why should she pay someone ten dollars for a scenario when she can just write it up herself. And she had to rewrite everything she bought. She said, you wouldn't recognize it after I got done with it. So I think she wrote most of those, but she didn't claim it. She needed that camouflage to express herself. There's a funny one called Sticky Woman. She's looking stamps in

a post office. I can't tell if it's her playing the woman who's doing this or not. I'll go out on a limb. I definitely think it's her, But she's looking stamps and this guy comes into the post offs and he gets all excited about her because she's looking her lips, and he grabs her and kisses her, and they get stuck together with all the glue from the stamps.

And then somebody has to come over and cut his mustache offs so that separate, and then she has a mustache that relates to the convent because the nuns told the girls that if you kiss a boy, you'll get a super mustache. Then there's the consequences of feminism. I think she's in that one too. I like the ones that she's in. She's wearing like a bare coat and carries a rifle. They throw the men out of the bar and the women are all sitting there and drinking.

So that's a fun one. And there's another one where she drops in a cabbage patch and has a baby. That's her too, that one's called Madame has her cravings. The madame, as portrayed by Alice Ki, also steals candy from a baby, absent from a distracted diner, a herring from a beggar, and a salesman's pipe before having her baby, and a roadside cabbage match. It is a wacky and wonderfully weird five minutes. So these you can see on YouTube, but there is no extant film. More associated with Alice

kis Falling Leaves. The published scenario is unique among her catalog. Falling Leaves is the only one that says Alski blush on it that I can find. I have found any other stories with her name on it. The star of it is a little girl, and it's from the point of view the little girl. When the cameras watching the scene, the little girl will be behind somebody, but then she comes out so you can see her face, so we're all was looking at her face to see what she's thinking.

She looks like she's six. She has an older sister. It looks like she's seventeen or eighteen, but she's coughing. The doctor tells the mother that when the leaves saw off the trees, she'll be gone. The little girl hears it, and then she looks at the leaves and she goes like, I can do something about this. So she gets some string and she ties the leaves on the trees. While she's tying the leaves on the trees at night, some famous inventive doctor comes by and she says, you're a doctor,

come in and see my sister. And he has this elixir that he's just developed. He cures her and they get married. So you know, that's the story, but it's about the little girl. I think Alice did that a lot. She took a sad story and even a happy ending, and that was just her way of coping. I think she drew on her personal experience because she wrote a lot. She had to write on demand, like every day, producing those films at Gomant and then again at her own company.

You accuse writers of that, and they go like, no, no, no. You can't tell which exact detail of the story is from her life, but some of them are details from her life. You find this, you find this analysis scenario is a little six year old girl who's that, you know. I think her whole life is about what happened to her when she was a little girl. A lot of her stories were about these problems come to the family,

but then the family and is reunited. I think that was one of her driving creative forces because her family was broken up. I mean, if you have a you know, easy life, why would you produce art? What for and had conspired for, Alice was not to last. A series of ambitious films like the nine feature Dick Whittington and his Cat lost money for the Soulax studio. The War, the changing industry, even factors more personal could have had

their impact on the company's downfall. But at the end of the day, what happened to Solas is anybody's gas. I have my own business for a few years, and I was amazed. You know, when you start your business, people come in and go like, how's it going like the first day, and you realize right away that you have to say it's great every day, no matter how it is, because people won't patronize you if they don't

think you're successful. So even from the first day, you have to say it's going great, everything's great, And then the littlest thing can push you over the edge. Bad weather, an uninjured loss, sick for a week, I mean, you can't recover. When things got tight in like nineteen the studio is a nice asset for them. They rented it

to other film companies. Solax transformed again and became for over eighteen months under the name of Popular Plays and Players as a player for Universal World, Metro Path and others. We were rightly called suckers fish who take not only the bait but the hook. Herbert and Alice were still working there making films for the other companies, but they were renting the studio to the other companies. I don't know if there's a Solax film after nineteen fourteen that's

called the Slax film. But she was making films after just they were under names of different companies. But that studio had a fire in nineteen nineteen and then she sold it in bankruptcy in ninete. I think Herbert had come to Hollywood en for record. He ran off with this leading lady she came in about. She worked on a couple of films with him. Tarnished Reputations was the last film that she's listed as director on, so was

the last for her. I don't think she liked Hollywood, so that's when she decided to go back home America. They say, always takes back anything she gives you. Completely discouraged. I resolved to return to France with my children. Just look at it from her point of view. You know, her mother was getting older. She had a couple of sisters left in France. They've gotten through the war. She probably didn't see them for four years during the war.

I think she just wanted to go home, and you know, her marriage broke up and that was hard for her, and then she couldn't get work. So you know, who likes that, and she's in a foreign country. Why not go home? The film industry and France did not recover. Gomant made like three films, so there was no place for her in the film industry in France. So she started writing until her daughter started working, and she managed. But I don't I don't think she had a lot

of money in the rest of her life. There's not a lot known about after she goes back to France. William Fox was a friend of hers, and she worked for Fox making film scripts into novels that could be sold. She did that in the late thirties. By then she was sixty something, and then she wrote her memoirs in the nineteen forties early fifties, she got interviewed a lot.

In the fifties and early sixties, her daughter and son were here in the US, so she came back here in nineteen sixty four, and she died in the US. In of the over one thousand films that al Ski is credited with directing, most of which she wrote, produced, and occasionally even start in, less than a quarter are thought to survive. When she returned to America, she went to look for her films, confident that she could find them.

She never did. Alice went to the Library of Congress and wrote letters to film archives, but she was only able to find two or three of her films. Even in her nineties, Alice, cryptic as ever, described the love she left behind. She wrote about it in her memoirs, which, despite her efforts, she could not get published during her lifetime. In a newspaper interview in ninety three, she let slip the words my faithful Gustav and no one knew who

she was talking about. Uh. Interviewed by her granddaughter in front of French TV cameras, in Alice says, I'm glad they would have married him. Oh. Ephemeral is written and assembled by and produced by Any Reese, Matt Frederick, and Tristan McNeil. Our American Eliski was portrayed by Victoria Temple. Janelle Dietrich is the author five books on Elie k Blache, including the novel Mademoiselle Alice and her newest work, The

Famous Boarding School at fair Yer. Find them wherever books are sold, and find us at ephemeral dot show next time on Ephemeral. My grandfather, William gret Still is commonly known as the Dean of African American composers. That's mos sleep because he has a very long list of first like he was the first black man to conduct a

major radio orchestra. He could get so irritated that people were always calling him a black composer because he was like, what do you call Copeland a Jewish composer every time you introduce him. We need to just stop treating it like black music. Stop only performing the Afromaerican Symphony, stop only performing it during Black History Month, start playing the freaking music. Support Ephemeral by recommending an episode, leaving a review,

or dropping this a line at Ephemeral Show. More podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, and learn more at ephemeral dot show