Although Alfred Jarry and Georges Méliès are often cited as progenitors of the Parisian avant-garde in theatre and film respectively, eventually influencing André Breton’s Surrealism, a debt is also owed to Alice Guy, for she, too, developed many of the themes and aesthetics of avant-gardism, the most notable of which is her questioning of societal norms through gender. Her status as a feminist icon was established in the 1970s by Nicole-Lise Bernheim, Claire Clouzot and the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF); but what is left unsaid when categorizing Guy as a woman filmmaker? This article interrogates the standard timeline of French film history and the presumption that the contributions to the new medium of film were made by the male contributors who so often receive the credit. This both reinforces previous scholarship that has already demonstrated the false narrative of assuming that Alice Guy did not contribute anything new to cinema (McMahan, Simon, Slide and others), and puts Guy in dialogue both with André Breton’s Surrealism and with her obvious artistic inheritor, Germaine Dulac. The gendered nature of Guy’s innovation: women-centred storytelling and gender non-conformity; in conjunction with her penchant for absurdism, demonstrate her innovative take on the burgeoning cinematic media of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recognizing not only Guy’s contribution to early cinema but also her influence on the Parisian avant-garde allows for both a reinterpretation of the genesis of avant-gardism in the twentieth century and a re-evaluation of Guy’s filmography that aligns it more closely with the work of Georges Méliès.
Vanessa C. Weller (Sun,) studied this question.