The First But Not the Last
Alice Guy-Blaché made 444 films from 1896 to 1920. In 1906, she directed forty-two films alone, including an account of the story of Jesus of Nazareth, La vie du christ (The Life of Christ). I don't know if the following fact has anything to do with why she chose her subject, but Guy-Blaché was thirty-three when she made the film, the traditional age of Jesus at the time of his crucifixion.
The film, too, runs to just under thirty-three minutes. Divided into twenty-five scenes, the camera set-ups, in keeping with the years of early cinema, remain still, except for one shot with a pan to the left following Jesus bearing his cross up the hill of Golgotha. This short camera movement looks like an innovation, although it most likely isn't. Alice Guy-Blaché did pioneer some visual effects and used interracial casts. One of the striking things about La vie du christ is the variety of people, all in costumes, moving around in the twenty-five shots comprising her film. The camera set-ups are all at a remove from the action, making them medium-long shots. We don't see details of Christ's face, or most of the extras, except in a medium shot of Saint Veronica, who, according to tradition, wiped Jesus's face at the Sixth Station of the Cross. An image of Veronica holding the cloth with Jesus's face imprinted on it follows.
The film employed about 300 extras. Alice Guy-Blaché moves them about in various creative ways, has a crowd of Jerusalem's citizens watching Jesus getting scourged. The procession up the hill of Golgotha is particularly moving, the location a mount with big smooth rocks, the kind of place kids might play hide and seek.
It's a film with women dressed in white gowns and angel wings; Roman officers in their regalia riding on horseback, Roman soldiers, Jewish officials, men in heavy beards, women and children almost always on view going about their lives. A film showing an ancient and alien culture, both historical and mythical, divided into moments in the life and death of a man who was also God, according to the New Testament. The large participation of 300 extras probably working for little or nothing reminds me of the medieval builders of cathedrals, working on collective projects with architectural structure and stained glass window imagery. Movies, young in 1906, had something of this collective effort. When we see the people on screen in those old films, before movie stars, we don't know their names but we can know that they decided to come together to help create art works under the aegis of an architect, that is, a director.
Alice Guy-Blaché, the first woman to make films, was as capable as any man in her profession, but due to the institutional sexism of the industry as it grew during the twentieth century, women were regarded better left in front of the camera, or "cutting" film as editors, following montage plans designed for them to follow. It could've been different, but maybe the male-dominated film industry didn't want the competition, so they made up the notion that women couldn't helm a film. In Hollywood in the Golden Age, only a few, like Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino, proved them wrong. Even today, unfortunately, most film directors are mostly men.
Vic Neptune
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