France: Pathé Versus Gaumont
Before 1904 - the cinema
1) Cinema led a somewhat vagrant existence.
2) Producers sold film prints, and
3) exhibitors showed them in vaudeville houses, music halls, rented theaters, and
fairground tents.
4)The same prints were often resold and continued to circulate for years,
becoming ever more battered.
Around 1905
1)The film industry expanded and stabilized.
2) Permanent theaters were devoted especially to film, and
3) production expanded to meet increased demand.
4) Italy and Denmark joined the ranks of important producing countries,
and filmmaking on a smaller scale emerged in many other lands.
France
1) During this period, the French film industry was still the largest, and
2) its movies were the ones most frequently seen around the world.
3)The two main firms, Pathé Frères and
4) Gaumont, continued to expand,
5) Other companies were formed in response to an increased demand from exhibitors.
6) As in many Western countries, workers were winning a shorter workweek and
7) thus had more leisure time for inexpensive entertainments.
8) The French firms also courted a wider middle-class audience.
From 1905 to 1908 - France
1)the French film industry grew rapidly.
2)Pathé was already a large company, with three separate studios.
3) It was also one of the earliest film companies to become vertically integrated.
Vertically Integrated Firm
1) A vertically integrated firm is one controlling the production, distribution, and
exhibition of a film.
2) Vertical integration has been a major strategy pursued by film companies and often
a measure of their strength.
Pathé - 1906 -11
1) made its own cameras and projectors, produced films,
2) and around 1911 began manufacturing film stock as well.
3) In 1906, Pathé also started buying theaters.
4) The following year, the firm began to distribute its own films
by renting rather than selling them to exhibitors.
5) By then, it was the largest film company in the world.
6) Starting in 1908, it distributed films made by other companies as well.
Horizontal Integration
1)Aside from being a vertically integrated firm, Pathé also used the strategy of
horizontal integration.
2) This term means that a firm expands within one sector of the film industry,
3) as when one production firm acquires and absorbs another one.
4) Pathé enlarged its film production by opening studios in such places as
Italy, Russia, and the United States.
5) From 1909 to 1911, its Moscow branch made about half the films produced in
Russia.
Gaumont
1) Pathé’s main French rival, Gaumont, also expanded rapidly.
2) After finishing its new studio in 1905, the firm took on additional filmmakers.
3) Alice Guy Blaché trained this new staff and turned to making longer films herself.
Film Introduction
1) Guy Blaché collaborated with designer Victorin Jasset on La Naissance, la vie et la
mort de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ
(“The Birth, Life, and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” 1906).
2) This scene of the scourging of Christ indicates the elaborate staging and sets used
for some prestige films of this period.
The Birth, Life, and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Alice Guy Blaché, 1906)
Film Clip (For the entire film, but The Torment)
Alice Guy Blaché at Gaumont from Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (Pamela B. Green, 2018)
Film Trailer
START OF Notes from the documentary on Alice Guy Blaché :
Made the Cabbage fairy...newborns are in the patch. You needed people like Alice to let them know cinema was more than stock footage. She used the cabbage thing a few times. Alice was made head of the production at Gaumont. She also helped exhibits to sell the cameras. Many people though cinema would be temporary, maybe that's why she got her high position.
Restorers complain that we restore Metropolis 100 times when we should be sharing all the older female directors work, like Alice. Restoring we can see how sophisticated these films were especially Alice Guy's films. How magical and emotionally engaging they are.
Alice develops the Gaumont-House-style. B& W and color versions distributes domestic and Internationally.
Similar to early YouTube early films had stunts, dogs with tricks and trips around the world. The basic content. People learn by mimicing film that exists already.
Alice: The first films we made always had to have a punch line.
At the 1900 International Exposition the attractions were a moving sidewalk and motion pictures. Gaumont films were screened there. Alice receives an award as collaborator.
Also in 1900 Gaumont gives an exhibit in Brussels of the cinematographe and showcases the company's successful films. The Cabbage Fairy is applauded. Other films shown are
a George Melies film from Star Film and a Zecca film from Pathe and a Porter film from Edison.
Alice: When people citique the first films, it really breaks my heart. If they only saw the conditions we made films in. There were camera problems, film problems and problems with development. The first generation of film cameras were very difficult.
Museum Cinematheque Francaise in Paris, France.
Correspondence between Alice and Gaumont family is in the museum.
The Gaumont System, The Chronophone - Alice was involved with it.
In 1902 Leon Gaumont and George Laudet patent their Chronophone invention.
A system for making films with synchronized sound.
Record is made on wax and then - they mouth the words on film -
These are called Phono-Scenes
Thomas Edison and Alice both made sound films.
Dickson Experimental Sound Film - 1894
The difference
Edison would record the sound live on the set. The actors would yell onto the
horns to be recorded.
Alice Guy - prerecorded the sound
machines: The phonograph on one side and the cinematographe on the other
connected by an electric device that synchronized them. (Picture above)
This footage of her directing is amazing to see a woman in command from that
time period. It's not just pointing the camera, you had to have music and then
Alice is a pioneer in the film musical.
Alice works with the biggest stars of film and dance.
Other Phono-scene are made in Madrid, Grenada and Barcelona.
where Alice and her cameraman, Anatole Thiberville, also shoot documentaries
of famed sights (1905 Spain - looks like Monteserrat)
Going around Spain at that time required quite a lot of courage for a woman alone
(Simone Blache, daughter of Alice Guy-Blache). She had a cameraman along with her.
She was not completely alone. I wouldn't say she was fearless, but she was not fearful.
The Gaumont Company's success enables them to expand production and build a new
studio near the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. Pictured below:
Alice produces and directs the first film shot in the new studio, La Esmeralda
Based on Victor Hugo's The Hunchbaack of Notre Dame. Alice purchases scripts and runs weekly production meetings.
She hires Etienne Arnaud and Louis Feuillade as writers and directors and set designer
Henri Menessier.
Comedies of seduction, and a variety of chase films.
Several of these films reveal techniques she learned at Gaumont from her mentor, Frederic Dillaye. He taught me how to shoot people further and closer. To make them smaller or larger. We discovered, for example, how to shoot backwards.
One of my favorites, Gamekeeper's Son, The Guns and the knives, I was tense watching it.
Afraid for the kid. The father died, it was heartbreaking, and that she could tell that kind of story in four or five minutes and get you at the edge of your seats was incredible.
She was the first great comic director (example The Cleaning Man) Most of her comedies that absolute perfect comic timing. (Race for the Sausage 1906 for example)
Madame's Cravings was so unusual because it is so rare
to see pregnancy in a movie
She grabs a fish from a homeless guy,
and is eating it - she steals the absynth from a cafe goer.
she's so bad, this lady.
She was really funny and she knew how to film funny.
The timing on the Drunken Mattress 1906 is really astonishing
it's then going to be very mobile is very important. Whoever that was who kept picking up the mattress should get an Academy Award (Peter Bogdanovich) I've never seen anybody fall down so much.
Here is this woman who as a girl was raised in a convent, and she's making these tremendously raunchy films. Example (The consequences of Feminism, 1906)
or The Sticky Woman 1906 - the maid is licking stamps.
her mouth becomes very sticky
- a man is watching and gets excited because the woman is
licking things. He kisses her and they get stuck. People are
trying to pull them apart. A postal worker brings in scissors.
Half his moustache comes glued on her face.
Peter Bogdanovich: From having seen just a few of Alice B's films, she had
witty. It's a satirical comment on male fear or feminism.
Someone else: Still to this day, I've never seen anything like that, Where she has women in women's clothes and men in men's clothes and these men are acting as women (Julie Taymor)
and the women are acting as men. it's revolutionary.
Another person: It's like she's saying, look what it's like to be in our situation, but then there's a bit of self-mockery in it too. Someone else, It's ageless. It's a wonderful idea and she made it first. (Patty Jenkins) She must have had a huge influence.
women rebelled, they began to frequent cafes, talk politics, smoke cigars, while their husbands sat at home doing the washing. Eisenstein was 8 years old, and at that time, it was forbiddem
for children to see such a film. This moment was important for him.
This film is the main film he mentioned. Eisenstein showed also in his style
a little bit of Alice Guy in his film October1928
How she makes this ironical image of male/female
and thanks to you, you gave us the director of this film and the title,
and the role of her film in his life and his education.
his formation as a director.
END OF NOTE on documentary on Alice Guy.
1) Following Pathé’s lead, other companies and entrepreneurs opened film theaters,
aiming at affluent consumers.
2) Such theaters often showed longer and more prestigious films.
3) Prosperity in the French industry and in film exports led to the formation of several
smaller firms during this period.
The Film d’Art company,
1) One of these had a significant impact.
2) As its name suggests, the Film d’Art company, founded in 1908,
identified itself with elite tastes.
3) One of its first efforts was The Assassination of the Duc de Guise
(Charles Le Bargy and André Calmettes, 1908).
4) Using stage stars, a script by a famous dramatist, and an original score by classical
composer Camille Saint-Saëns, the film told the story of a famous incident in French
history.
5) It was widely shown and had a successful release in the United States.
6)The Assassination of the Duc de Guise and similar works created a model of
what art films should be like.
7)The Film d’Art company, however, lost money on most of its productions
and was sold in 1911.
8) The sets and acting in The Assassination of the Duc de Guise derived from the
theater.
9) Its shots, however, showed characters moving smoothly from one space to another,
as when the Duc de Guise walks through a curtained doorway to confront his
enemies.
The Assassination of the Duc de Guise (Charles Le Bargy and André Calmettes, 1908)
Film Clip (The King's guards (the forty-five) stab Henri de Guise.
Black and white - fancy palace like setting. bedchamber. Leaving one room and arriving in another. Change of camera location - twice -
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