Kim Tomadjoglou is an audio-visual curator-archivist specializing in rights clearances, preservation, collections management, and museum programming and has curated retrospectives at museums and festivals internationally. She has served as director of the American Film Institute’s National Collection and as principal liaison to the Library of Congress, where she was a 2019 Kluge Fellow.
First, can you give me a brief summary of who Alice Guy-Blaché is and why she is significant?
Alice Guy-Blaché is world cinema’s first woman director, and although her legacy remains defined by that title, she was a multi-dimensional figure—writing, producing, and supervising films, instructing players and other directors, and also making costumes.
She began her career in 1894 in France as a secretary to Léon Gaumont at Le Comptoir Général de Photographie, a still-photography and optical equipment company. When the business failed a year later, Alice convinced Gaumont to purchase the business and establish a firm of his own, Gaumont et Cie. The company began motion picture production in 1897 and quickly became one of France’s leading film studios.
The turn of the century in Paris was a time of innovation and invention, particularly of precision instruments that captured motion and sound. New technologies and business opportunities fostered competition and collaboration between engineers, scientists and financiers, most of whom were male.
Young Alice, as she was called, was indispensable to Leon Gaumont and soon became a manager supervising talking pictures utilizing his latest invention, the Chronophone synchronized sound system. She also made her own films and collaborated on others made by the company. In 1907, Alice married the younger Herbert Blaché, also employed by Gaumont, and the couple immigrated to the U.S. where Herbert was to market the Chronophone.