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- Alice Guy. Widely considered the first female film director, Guy is also credited with helming one of the first narrative films, an 1896 short called “The Cabbage Fairy.”
- Lois Weber. A woman of many interests, Weber was a street evangelist and musician before she turned to acting and filmmaking. In 1908, she began her directing career at American Gaumont Chronophone, where fellow filmmaking pioneer Alice Guy-Blaché and her husband were then ensconced.
- Lotte Reiniger. Born and raised in Germany, Reiniger pioneered the use of silhouette animation, directing one of the first feature-length animated films, the 1926 release “The Adventures of Prince Achmed,” with this technique.
- Dorothy Arzner. Arzner grew up in Hollywood and began typing scripts before working her way up to helming “Women’s Fashions” for Paramount in 1927. While directing the studio’s first talkie, “The Wild Party,” she improvised a boom microphone for silent star Clara Bow, who was nervous about speaking on camera.
Oct 19, 2018 · Having made more than 1,000 films, Guy-Blaché is not only credited as the first female film director, but also the first person in the world, in 1896, to make a narrative film, titled The Cabbage...
- Silent Cinema Dominance
- Rejection at The Dawn of Commercial Hollywood
- Continued Post-War Struggle
- Late Century Resurgence
- Breakthrough in The New Millennium
- Contemporary Triumph
At the dawn of cinema, when the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Matrix were a mere twinkle in the eyes of such innovators as Georges Méliès and Auguste and Louis Lumière, women dominated the film industry. Such began shortly before the dawn of the 20th century in 1896, when the French film The Cabbage Fairy, directed by Alice Guy-Blaché woul...
As Hollywood headed into the 1920s, cinema was on course for one inevitable innovation, the dawn of sound and movie ‘talkies’. Even before this, movies had become a significant business and male producers were beginning to barge their way into the industry to sculpt it as they saw fit. Once movie production became the most profitable industry in Lo...
Following the end of the Second World War, the film industry experienced a tumultuous time as inflation and labour unrest boosted domestic production costs, making filmmaking an expensive game. Social trends had also shifted, making it difficult for studio executives to predict what audiences, still reeling from the impact of war, really wanted as ...
As Hollywood waved goodbye to the archaic studio system, American cinema was renewed, refreshed and inspired by the growth of ‘free love’ emanating through contemporary culture as it entered the 1970s. Allowing the industry to be freer and to take more risks as the stiff movie moguls of the past died out, such a change allowed an influx of female f...
Several distinct female voices flourished in the 1990s, with the likes of Claire Denis, Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola, Lynne Ramsay and Jane Campion each thriving with the releases of Beau Travail, Point Break, The Virgin Suicides, Ratcatcher and The Piano, respectively. In all fields of filmmaking, women were granted the creative freedom to play ...
Hitting back at generations of male dominance in cinema the start of the 2010s saw continued proof of female power in the contemporary film industry, with Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first female director ever to take home the award for Best Picture, praised for her modern war film The Hurt Lockerin 2010. However, this victory was just the start o...
Jun 10, 2019 · A woman directed what was probably the world’s first scripted narrative fiction film; in the mid-to-late teens the Universal studio was bursting with female directors.
Apr 9, 2024 · Being the only woman who directed films in the late 1800s to the early 1900s, her work should be celebrated alongside her peers such as Georges Méliès and the Lumière Brothers. Born Alice Guy in 1873, the director was first hired by camera manufacturer Félix-Max Richard in 1895.
Jul 13, 2020 · As women we’re so inherently skeptical of situations like this — picking up a strange hitch-hiker off the street — that a female director seems uniquely suited to direct a film requiring subtle and careful observations about how humans interact.
Apr 2, 2022 · As movies, studios, and the film industry in general became hugely profitable in what would later be called the Golden Age of Hollywood, female directors virtually disappeared. Guy-Blaché lived...
