After years of relative obscurity, Alice Guy-Blaché is now being recognized for her role in the development of the cinematic arts. Beginning as a typist for the Gaumont Company, she volunteered to produce a series of novelty films. So successful were her films—and so efficient her methods—she eventually became the studio’s head of production. During cinema’s first decade, the multi-talented Guy-Blaché experimented with color and synchronized sound (decades before these technologies would be perfected) and cultivated such diverse genres as slapstick comedy, social realism, historical epic, and fantasy. Though rooted in the theatrical style of the Belle Époque, there is a decidedly modern sensibility to her films, as she playfully discovers comic and dramatic potential in the social mores of gender and class. This collection includes films made directly by Guy-Blaché at Gaumont, as well a sampling of films produced by others, under her executive supervision (for example, The Birth, the Life, and Death of Christ, 1906). ??

CONTENTS INCLUDE: At the Hypnotist’s (1898) Wonderful Absinthe (1899) At the Photographer’s (1900) The Cabbage-Patch Fairy (1900) Turn-of-the-Century Surgery (1900) Midwife to the Upper Class (1902) Alice Guy Films a “Phonoscène” (1905) The Results of Feminism (1906) The Drunken Mattress (1906) The Hierarchy of Love (1906) Madame Has Her Cravings (1906) A Sticky Woman (1906) The Rolling Bed (1907) The Glue (1907) and more!

Booklet essay by film historian Kim Tomadjoglou

Restoration samples