Film
Alice Guy Blaché Program
- 4:15PM
The first female filmmaker. The first director ever to make a narrative fiction film. A trailblazer who headed Gaumont studios for a decade and later owned her own production company. Alice Guy-Blaché was a true pioneer whose essential films touch on issues of women’s empowerment, race, and sexuality.
New 2K DCP courtesy Kino Lorber
Dir. Alice Guy Blaché
1912, 10min, DCP
This fascinating slice of early queer cinema concerns a foppish dandy who goes West, where he kisses cowboys while proving he’s as tough as any of them.
Dir. Alice Guy Blaché
1912, 12min, DCP
Two heroic women nab a villain in this rousing, proto-feminist western.
Dir. Alice Guy Blaché
1912, 12min, DCP
The oldest known film to feature an all-black cast, this comic short is a vital historical record of the African-American image on celluloid.
Preserved by New York Women in Film & Television’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund
Dir. Alice Guy Blaché
1915, 14min, DCP
A young man has 12 minutes to marry if he hopes to inherit a fortune in this antic farce, which “comically meditates upon the gendered, class, and racial fantasies and anxieties of early 20th century American culture” (author Margaret Hennefeld).
Preserved by New York Women in Film & Television’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund
Dir. Alice Guy Blaché
With Doris Kenyon, Carlyle Blackwell, William Morris
1916, 40min, DCP
A touching, beautifully crafted melodrama about a young woman (a striking performance from silent star Doris Kenyon) who falls in love with a writer while attempting to escape her abusive stepfather.
Go to the movies just once a month and a BAM membership pays for itself.
Thematically daring, formally innovative works from one of cinema history’s first auteurs.
A striking backwoods melodrama and an early treatment of racial prejudice.
Alla Nazimova’s delirious, decadent, Art Nouveau-meets-camp spectacle.