Film Commission to Present Symposium on First Female Filmmaker

The Fort Lee Film Commission is sponsoring a symposium next month dedicated to the first female filmmaker in cinema history, Alice Guy Blache, as part of the 2011 Garden State Film Festival (GSFF) in Asbury Park, New Jersey. The symposium, Reel Jersey Girls:  Alice Guy to Today– a Century of Women in Film, is a key event, said Fort Lee Film Commission executive director Tom Meyers, at what he calls “the largest annual film festival in the state of New Jersey.”

Alice Guy Blache, one of the first three filmmakers in France, began directing in the 1890s. In 1912, Blache came to the then motion picture capital of the world, Fort Lee, and built her $100,000 studio, Solax, on Lemoine Ave.  There she produced, wrote and directed hundreds of films, according to Meyers.

“She was one of the first French filmmakers going back to the late 1800s, early 1900s making synchronized sound film,” Meyers said. “She came to the U.S. and located in Fort Lee in 1912 because it was the center of film production in the U.S. And there was a large French-speaking population here involved in the filmmaking industry as well.”

In fact, he added, there were so many French filmmakers living in Fort Lee at the time that there was a French language newspaper published in Fort Lee.

Meyers called the April 2 symposium a “really high-end event, because that’s going to be the largest symposium to date devoted to this Fort Lee filmmaker.”

 He also said the Garden State Film Festival is the perfect venue to get Blache some much-needed recognition.

“GSFF is the largest film festival annually held in the state, so it’s a great venue to reach out to a lot of people, including the New Jersey Hall of Fame, who we’re hoping inducts Alice next year, which would be the centennial of the building of her Solax film studio in Fort Lee,” Meyers said.

He also said the film commission is leading efforts to get the Director's Guild of America to formally honor Blache “as a cinema pioneer” at the DGA’s event this October in New York City.

Also part of the symposium in Asbury Park is the Fort Lee Film Commission’s presentation of its annual Alice Guy Blache Award, established in 2008 to promote Blache’s legacy. Meyer’s said this year’s recipient is Diane Raver, Executive Director of the Garden State Film Festival. 

Previous recipients of the “Alice Award,” as Meyers fondly calls it, are Academy Award winning actress and director Lee Grant (2008), Director's Guild of America Vice President Gary Donatelli (2009 - who Meyers says “is helping us get Alice into the DGA”) and actress Parker Posey (2010).

If you ask Meyers if Alice Guy Blache’s importance in film history and relevance to modern female filmmakers is well recognized today, his answer is an emphatic, “No.”

“In fact, it would have been totally forgotten if it wasn’t for her writing her own autobiography before she died for people to pick up the torch afterwards,” Meyers said. “There still needs to be a lot of work done. Getting the DGA to honor her this October in New York City as part of their 75th anniversary certainly goes a long way as does the symposium in Asbury Park. We’re hopeful that these events will really put her back on the map where she belongs.”

The Reel Jersey Girls:  Alice Guy to Today– a Century of Women in Film symposium takes place April 2 at 3 p.m. at the Parlor Gallery, 717 Cookman Ave., Asbury Park, NJ. The Fort Lee Film Commission will screen Blache’s A House Divided (1913), produced at Solax Studio in Fort Lee. The event also includes a panel discussion followed by a Q & A.

Panelists include Diane Raver, Founder and Executive Director of Garden State Film Festival; Joan Simon, Curator of the Whitney Museum’s retrospective of Alice Guy Blache films; Steve Gorelick, Executive Director, New Jersey Motion Picture & Television Commission; Kimberly Skyrme, Producer, Casting Director, President of Board of WiFTI; Hisani DuBose, Director; Christina Kotlar Turchyn, Fort Lee Film Commission, NYWiFT/WiFTI and moderator Terry Lawler, Executive Director of New York Women in Film & Television.

The 9th Annual Garden State Film Festival is March 31-April 3.