Girl on Film

Alice Guy Blache cut her teeth at the Gaumont Film Company, in Paris, where she was head of production in the final years of the 19th century. By 1906 she had become the first filmmaker to fully develop narrative structure, and was also synchronizing sound recordings with images, which was radical at the time. In the course of her life she was involved in writing, directing or producing a staggering 700 films of varied genre, including Algie Making an American Citizen (1912), The Pit and the Pendulum (1913), My Madonna (1915) and House of Cards (1917). A new retrospective at the Whitney Museum offers a long-overdue examination of her work.