Female Film Pioneers: Alice Guy Blache

Alice Guy Blaché (center) helped invent cinema as we know it. The first female filmmaker and among the first to make a fiction film, she made her debut in 1896 with the one-minute “The Cabbage Fairy.” She shot this charmer — which shows a sprite smilingly plucking real babies from a cabbage patch — on a Paris patio while working as a secretary for Gaumont, which would soon be a film powerhouse. Historians ignored and even rejected that date perhaps, as the theorist Jane M. Gaines has suggested, it was unthinkable that a young female secretary supporting a widowed mother could be responsible for an early-cinema milestone. She is thought to have made some 1,000 films (mostly shorts) that included cowboy flicks, cross-dressing comedies and melodramas. 

From “You Know These 20 Movies. Now Meet the Women Behind Them” by Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott for the New York Times; Photo from Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

#female #women #woman #movie #movies #hollywood #film #filmmaker #writer #actor #acting #director #writing #whoruntheworld #girls #girlboss #girlpower #funfact #instagood #story #stories #thestorybar