The movie begins by showing how few present-day big-name filmmakers know who Guy is and what she accomplished in her career. She made hundreds of films both in France and in the United States at a time when women rarely held other jobs outside stenography and domestic work. She ran productions, pioneered cinematic language, and started her own film studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the Hollywood town of the early film industry. Yet, for all of her success, she was left out of several history books, her legacy questioned because of her gender, and her works attributed to male assistants or actors.
For women watching the movie, Guy’s story may ring infuriatingly familiar. While we may say nothing, we very much remember the time our name is left off of group efforts, the time our partner is credited with someone we did, or someone assumes we can’t be the one in charge. The documentary goes into great detail just how sexist attitudes of mostly male historians and critics wrote out a prolific woman out of books; how her former boss, Léon Gaumont, left out her contributions to his studio out of his records; and how Guy’s husband, Herbert Blaché, took credit for her Solax Studio for decades.
Green does an incredible job of piecing together the work of academics, scholars, old family heirlooms and almost forgotten private collections to reconstruct Guy’s story. There’s an exciting element to seeing the director painstakingly calling source after source like an investigative reporter. In one endearing sequence, Guy and Gaumont’s descendants tour the spots of where their distant relatives made some of the first movies. Yet, adding too many of these elements distracts from Guy’s story. There’s a sequence of getting an old Silent Era camera to work that is visually interesting but doesn’t serve the search for Guy. The Skype calls begin to blur together, and the celebrity interviews being to feel less impactful.
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