History Lesson
Reel Jersey Girl
First woman filmmaker made her mark at Fort Lee’s Solax Studio
nookie from MTV
isn’t a Jersey girl –
she isn’t even from
New Jersey,” Tom
Meyers, Fort Lee
Film Commission
executive director, says. “Alice
Guy Blaché is our reel Jersey girl.”
Even before women had the
right to vote, director Alice Guy
Blaché (pronounced Ah-LEES
Ghee Bla-SHAY) was creating
cinematic art in such movies as
Dick Whittington and His Cat
(1913), The Ocean Waif (1916)
and Tarnished Reputations (1920).
In 1910, Blaché, a French filmmaker who had worked for the
Gaumont Film Company based in
France, decided to venture out on
her own entertainment endeavor
with her husband, British-born
American film director, producer
and screenwriter Herbert Blaché.
Along with a third partner, they
formed Solax Studios, a company
based out of Flushing, N.Y. In
1912, she built and operated Solax
Studio in Fort Lee, located on
Lemoine Avenue. The studio
contributed to the economic
growth and development of films
created in the Fort Lee area, helping making it the birthplace of
UNSUNG HOLLYWOOD HERO Alice Guy Blaché was a
America’s motion picture industry. French filmmaker who made her mark in the movies
directing films in the studio she built in Fort Lee.
“Alice Guy Blaché not only
paved the way for women filmmen only, had a far-reaching impact.
makers but for all filmmakers,” Diane
She headed a successful business and
Raver, Garden State Film Festival’s former
managed to maintain a family long
executive director and founder and the
2011 recipient of the Fort Lee Film
before the women’s lib movement
Commission’s Alice Guy Blaché Award,
made it fashionable.”
says. “Here was a woman who, during a
In a career spanning 28 years, Blaché
time in our history when all industries,
directed more than a thousand films, of
not just filmmaking, were considered for
which more than 100 were synchronized
30
MARCH 2016 (201) GOLD COAST
sound films and 22 were feature
films. She produced all of her
own films and many more by
other directors working under
her. She was also the first woman
to own and run her own studio
plant, Solax Studio, which, when
opened, was bigger than any
studio Hollywood had at that
time. But in the 1920s, when the
motion picture industry emerged
in Hollywood, Blaché returned to
France with her two children to
give lectures on film and write
novels from film scripts. She
never returned to filmmaking.
“She would almost singlehandedly develop the art of cinematic narrative and define the
role of movie director as separate
from that of camera operator,”
Alison McMahan, author of the
biography Alice Guy Blaché: Lost
Visionary of the Cinema, says.
“She eschewed expensive backdrops in favor of real locations,
making her films look startlingly
modern. She pioneered the use of
close-ups to dramatic effect in
films several years before D.W.
Griffith, who is usually given
credit for the innovation, even
started working in film. And most
important, she was the earliest
to deploy character arc and the
psychological perspective of a
lead character in a film story.”
Unfortunately, Blaché’s film career
remained unrecognized for many years,
and the Fort Lee Film Commission has
made continuing efforts to place Blaché
in the spotlight. In 2011, the Fort Lee
Film Commission sponsored its Annual
Garden State Film Festival with a symposium dedicated to Blaché, and she was
COURTESY OF FORT LEE FILM COMMISSION
“S
WRITTEN BY LAURA ADAMS STIANSEN