Introducing Alice
a new graphic novel project
Announcing an exciting new project with myself as writer and artists Mitch Miller and Kyla Tomlinson.
Have you heard of Alice Guy Blache? Martin Scorsese called her a filmmaker of ‘rare sensitivity, with a remarkable poetic eye.’ But I’m skipping ahead of myself here.
I’m so excited to tell you about her, and the project she has inspired us to make!
I studied filmmaking as an undergrad at Napier University, where I was one of two women in the class. There’s a psychological block you feel when you are a conspicuous minority- especially when it’s such a collaborative class.
But it was ever thus in the creative arts, right? We’ve got the whole history of visual arts and literature to tell us so.
So imagine my surprise when I discover that an important name had been missed out of my film history classes, and silent film screenings. I’ve watched Birth of a Nation in its entirety, and Man with a Movie Camera several times, but no one had thought to mention the name Alice Guy Blache.
She was the first female filmmaker, and arguably the first to understand it as an imaginative medium. I’m not talking about a woman who happened to get her hands on a camera and make a few shorts at the right time right place. Alice moved from a secretarial position to head of production for Gaumont within a couple of years. She eventually moved to America where she opened her own Solax Studios.
She wrote, directed, produced over a thousand films and her career outlasted all of her contemporaries including D W Griffith and Thomas Edison. I will tell you more about her on this substack as we progress, but there’s too much to say for one post.
It was Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film that eventually revealed her existence to me. My first proper production job as an assistant taught me a lot, but the first day is burned into my memory. I was invited to sit in Mark’s flat and do some archive research by watching a documentary on Alice called The Lost Garden (you can find it on youtube.) I was so stunned by what I was seeing- like looking into an alternative universe where women had important cultural significance!
I have dreamt of writing a story inspired by Alice since that day over ten years ago. The way she was forgotten and written out of history feels predictable given our current landscape where women still struggle to progress in creative roles. In fact Alice lived a long life and was able to see just how film historians were writing her out of her own story.
And so I have devised a new story about how Alice was forgotten, and how her characters have to go in search of her to save her. Unnatural Women: Finding Alice Guy is a fantasy tale with a Wizard of Oz vibe- a collection of unlikely characters band together to go in search of the Queendom of the Forgotten to rescue Alice. It’s a celebration of female creativity and how we all need inspiration from the past to keep us moving to the future.
Subscribe to this substack and I will write about our progress as we go, and share the historical research, concept art, films and our quest to find a Scottish filmmaker known only as Violet Domino.
I’m grateful to Creative Scotland for funding to allow us to produce the first chapter.
I’ll leave you with words from Alice.
“I have often been asked why I chose so unfeminine a career. Yet, I have not chosen this career. No doubt my destiny was traced before my birth and I have merely followed a will whose name I do not know. Strange Fate!”
