also coached her performers towards a realistic acting style, with the words “Be Natural” emblazoned on a large banner inside her studio. This was unusual for the time, because in silent film, actors were taught to “pose,” using over-the-top gestures to indicate their emotions. But if you look at the acting on one of Alice’s films, such as Falling Leaves, about a child suffering from tuberculosis, it’s toned down and realistic.
In the end, Alice had a sad conclusion to her career. Solax couldn’t compete with the major Hollywood studios, so she had to shut it down. Her marriage to Herbert also didn’t survive, so Alice moved back to France in 1922.
Five years later, she returned to the U.S. to get copies of her films, hoping she could use them to find work as a director in Paris. But out of her one thousand plus movies, Alice couldn’t find a single print.
This was very common during the silent era. Nobody thought movies would become a cultural phenomenon or that the preservation of film history would be important. It’s estimated that 90 percent of all silent films made in America have been lost. Negatives were destroyed after they played in the theater, and if they were nitrate prints, storage was often hazardous. This type of film stock was highly unstable and had a nasty habit of combusting when not maintained in exactly the right conditions. And once nitrate film caught fire, not even water would put out the flames.
So unfortunately for Alice and many other silent filmmakers, most of her work disappeared, and today only around 130 of her movies remain.
Now broke, Alice had to lean on her children for financial help. In 1930, to make matters worse, Léon Gaumont published a history of the Gaumont Film Company which didn’t mention anything before 1907. He omitted all of Alice Guy Blaché’s work as a director. Consequently, nobody knew for a long time how significant a role she played in setting up his very successful studios and in the birth of film itself.
Ten years before Alice passed away, the French Government discovered her accomplishments, and gave Alice the “Legion of Honor” in 1953. A year later, Léon Gaumont’s son Louis admitted in a public speech, “Madame Alice Guy Blaché, the first woman filmmaker … has been unjustly forgotten,” and film historians started to take notice.
In 2011, Martin Scorsese awarded a posthumous Director’s Guild of America Award to Alice Guy Blaché. In his speech, Martin called the loss of her history “a tragedy,” saying that Alice was “a pioneer in audiovisual story-telling … more than a talented business woman, she was a filmmaker of rare sensitivity, with a remarkable poetic eye and an extraordinary feel for locations.”
Lois Weber: Social Issues on Film
In 1916, one of the biggest hits in theaters was a movie about abortion, directed by a woman. That woman was Lois Weber, an actress, producer, writer, and filmmaker who pushed the content of movies from simple entertainment to tackling serious social issues.
Lois began her life in Pennsylvania in 1879, with a father who liked to tell fairy stories. He encouraged Lois to start writing at a young age, and fostered her creative spirit through music lessons. As a teenager, her independence impelled her to move to New York, where she paid her rent by playing piano for the tenants of a boarding house. At seventeen, Lois started touring with a theater company. She got this job through her uncle, who was a theater producer in Chicago and one of the few relatives to support her ambitious drive.
During one of her theater tours, Lois met stage manager Phillips Smalley, and they quickly fell in love, marrying within weeks. When their theater tour ended, Phillips joined another, and Lois tagged along. During these two years spent on the road, Lois kept herself busy by writing scenarios—bare-bones scripts for silent movies. She mailed them to film companies and was surprised when they began to sell.
When Phillips was hired for a new tour, Lois decided not to join him. Instead, she approached the American Gaumont Film Company. This was run by Alice Guy Blaché and her husband Herbert. In Alice, Lois had a role model of a female director, and Herbert was also encouraging of her talent. She joined Gaumont and not only wrote scenarios, but directed and starred in them too.
When her husband returned, this time it was Phillips who followed Lois. He got a job at Gaumont acting in her movies and helping direct. Together they churned out one short film after another. This was around 1910, when a structure for movie production was still evolving. The frantic pace actually gave Lois an advantage. As she said later in her career, “I grew up in the business when everybody was so busy learning their particular branch of the new industry, no one had time to notice whether or not a woman was gaining a foothold.”
Lois and Phillips got a chance to work on higher quality filmmaking when they both got jobs at the Rex Motion Picture Company, which eventually became part of Universal Pictures. The head of Rex, Edwin S. Porter, wanted to make tasteful, intimate dramas with small casts, and Lois excelled in that type of movie. She wrote intricate scenarios, pairing them with creative direction and editing. With her own signature style for each of her productions, Lois was an early auteur, or “author” of the cinema.
One of the most impressive films by Lois and Phillips is 1913’s Suspense. This ten-minute short is often cited as a film that pushed forward the art of visual storytelling. The movie is about a young mother (played by Lois) who becomes trapped inside her house with a homeless man, and calls her husband, who races home to save her.
In one landmark scene, Lois and Phillips heighten the tension by superimposing three different shots. On the left, the homeless man is seen entering the house. On the right, the wife calls her husband for help. And in the middle, the husband receives the distressing phone call. This was a clever way to show simultaneous action, and it was a technique audiences hadn’t seen before.
Though Phillips and Lois were a team for many years, she was often singled out for her talent. Professor Shelley Stamp, author of Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, says Lois was truly an innovator of cinematic style. “She had an extraordinary capacity for visual storytelling and was really pioneering in terms of using moving camera and superimposition,” Shelley said. “And what strikes me is the way she was able to convey the interior psychology of a character visually, using a whole bunch of techniques to help the audience understand what was going on inside a character’s head. That’s really hard to do.”
It was especially hard given her choice of subject matter. Lois said she wanted to make films which would “have an influence for good in the public’s mind.” So between 1914 and 1921, she made a series of “social problem” movies, becoming one of the earliest directors in America to tackle morally complex issues. Her 1916 film, Where Are My Children? is the one I previously mentioned, which focused on abortion. This was released around the same time as the arrest of activist Margaret Sanger, jailed for promoting the idea of family planning. Margaret Sanger’s story and the debate of legalizing birth control was the subject of Lois’ follow-up 1917 movie, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle. Then, in The People vs. John Doe, she looked at capital punishment, Hop, The Devil’s Brew was about drug abuse, and poverty was her subject in Shoes.
It’s amazing to think that these films were made back then, that a movie about birth control written and directed by a woman was not only allowed, but was really successful. You could not picture that happening today.
In 1921, Motion Picture magazine wrote, “When the history of the dramatic early development of motion pictures is written, Lois Weber will occupy a unique position.” She started making movies when films were silent, a maximum of twenty minutes long, and not yet a business venture. She finished when they had sound, were
