Alice & Eiffel: A New History of Early Cinema and the Love Story Kept Secret for a Century

When the cinema started in Paris in 1895, fifteen years before the first studio was built in Hollywood, the first film director was a young woman named Alice Guy who worked for Gaumont, one of the earliest manufacturers of motion picture cameras. The first films were only a minute long, but Alice at [...]
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When the cinema started in Paris in 1895, fifteen years before the first studio was built in Hollywood, the first film director was a young woman named Alice Guy who worked for Gaumont, one of the earliest manufacturers of motion picture cameras. The first films were only a minute long, but Alice at age twenty-two used the motion picture camera to stage a scene, a story showing babies being born in a cabbage patch. It was the first of hundreds of short films Alice wrote and directed. For eleven years, Alice made films in Paris and then in 1907 she came to the United States, where she wrote and directed hundreds of longer films in New York and Fort Lee, New Jersey, before Hollywood became the center of the film industry. Gustave Eiffel was president of the Gaumont company from its inception in 1895, but Alice did not meet him there. Eiffel for a century has been thought to be merely a silent partner in the Gaumont company. This book shows that he guided the company from the year before it was founded until the year Alice left the company. Alice wrote a memoir that was published in 1976. Her relationship to Eiffel and the role he played in her life is alluded to but well camouflaged. The brevity of Alice s memoir, little more than a hundred pages, has flummoxed researchers for decades. It has been called tangential and incomplete, tantalizing in what it leaves out. This book is about what Alice s memoirs leave out?the people introduced but not described, the difficulties alluded to but minimized, the losses and triumphs barely mentioned, and the love story she felt compelled to keep secret."