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Alice Guy: First Lady Of Film
By Catel Muller and writer Jose-Louis Bocquet
SelfMadeHero, £17.99
ILLUSTRATOR Catel Muller and writer Jose-Louis Bocquet bring to life the largely ignored story — and many, many works — of film pioneer Alice Guy, credited as the first female film-maker, in their engaging graphic biography.
Director Guy, still largely ignored today, was the director behind such shorts as La Fee aux Choux (The Fairy of the Cabbages) and The Rag-Picker, as well as dozens of others between 1897 and 1922.
In 1906 she made one of the first biblical epics La vie du Christ (The Life of Christ), employing no less than 300 actors.
Her films were considered innovative, daring, funny, and visually arresting, as well as inventive and technologically revolutionary — often experimenting with colour and sound.
Importantly, she didn’t shy away from subjects considered too “taboo” of her time, even directing — as illustrated in this book so engagingly — an all-black cast in the 1912 film A Fool and His Money, considered to be one of the first films to do so.
Yet, despite making hundreds of films, despite counting Alfred Hitchcock and Sergei Eisenstein among the admirers of her work, despite her important and revolutionary contribution to film, she died in the 1960s relatively unknown.
In 2011, Martin Scorcese described Guy as someone who had been “forgotten by the industry she helped to create.”
So Muller and Bocquet’s graphic tribute is a welcome contribution to the small catalogue of biographies on Guy.
In their comprehensive and engaging book, Muller and Bocquet have given us a wonderful blend of bio, love, loss and challenges — as well as a superhero like no other.
The fascinating story and elegant illustrations weave together so coherently, managing to encapsulate her struggles as a woman, innovative director as well as the later troubles she faced in her marriage to her collaborator husband (he put all their money on the stock market and eventually left her for an actor starring in one of their films).
This is definitely one for those who love film, as well as for those who love graphic novels — and an absolute must for those who love both.
