- Bob Channing: If it wasn't for people like you, she'd just remain buried.
- Narrator: Guy resigned from Gaumont to accompany her husband to the US. Alice returns to filmmaking and founds her own company. She directs and manages all aspects of production. Following a two decade career in two countries, comprised a thousand films that she wrote, directed or produced, Alice disappears from filmmaking.
- Julie Taymor: It's unbelievable to be a film director, and as old as I am, and to be a woman, and have never heard of her.
- Alice Guy: [1964 interview] It seemed extraordinary to me. It filled me with adoration. It was the birth of Cinema.
- Narrator: Alice, inspired by the Lumière screening, thinks something better can be done to documenting daily life. Why not use film to tell stories? Alice Guy writes, directs, and produces one of the first narrative films ever made. Alice is one of the first to utilize many film techniques, including close-ups, hand tinted color, and synchronized sound.
- Jane Gaines: One could say, Alice Guy is important to film history for all of the obvious reasons: starts her own company, directs, writes, she is the producer extraordinaire. But, that's not the best reason. Alice Guy-Blaché proves how wrong we often are. Women couldn't do it. Women wouldn't do it.
- Valerie Steele: Of course she's wearing a corset. Women climbed mountains wearing corsets. They could certainly direct a movie wearing corsets.
- Self - film archivist: The early filmmakers are like punk rockers of Cinema. The rules really hadn't been written yet. They were out there doing whatever they wanted to do.
- Valerie Steele: Just as women had a new freedom with bicycles, with a new medium, like photography and cinema, that opened new possibilities for women.
- Alice Guy: [1964 interview] I would very much have liked to be an actress, because I had friends in theater. But, I had a father that said, "No! Never! Actress?" My father said, "I'd rather see you dead." You know how the bourgeoisie was at the time.
- John Bailey: Archivist and preservationist and historians are looking at a lot of work that has been neglected. And so now that we have a chance through these digital restorations, we can see how sophisticated these films were - especially with Alice Guy's films. We're seeing just how magical and emotionally engaging they are.
- Vanessa Schwartz: The history of early film is tied to people who are not just creative, but, are business people. They're kind of the Steve Jobs of their own era.
- Alice Guy: [1964 interview] Those weren't really scenarios at that time, they were just little stories that I would make up.
- Narrator: Guamont names Alice, Head of Production. She supervises the studios output of demonstration films used to sell Gaumont cameras.
- Anthony Slide: Look at the films being made: a train coming Into a station, waves breaking on a beach. Who cares? They're just boring subjects. Cinema could died at that moment and nobody would have noticed. What you really need is people like Alice Guy to come in and show you there was more to the Cinema than just a stock shot.
- Henry Jenkins: The changes that have taken place in the digital era have been partially about amateur work. If we go back to the early part of the 20th Century, something similar is going on: stunts, trained animal acts, trips around the world, acts that are caught on camera - function in both Youtube and early Cinema as the basic content. One of the ways people are learning is through mimicking media that exist already. If we go back, it's the last time when underwent a similar revolution.
- Alice Guy: [1957 interview] I proposed to Monsieur Gaumont that I shoot some scenes. He told me, "Well it's a young girl's thing indeed. Well, you can try. But on the condition, don't let the mail suffer."
- Alice Guy: [1957 interview] There was a plain field, with a small terrace made of asphalt. We only had a tripod, which served like a photography tripod, that would go in every direction. And there, with my cameraman, I made my first film, which was "La Fée aux choux".
- Simone Blaché - Daughter of Alice Guy-Blaché: [1980s interview on her mother's 1905 travels making documentaries] Traveling around Spain, at that time, required quite a lot of courage for a woman alone. She had a cameraman along with her, she was not completely alone. I wouldn't say she was fearless, but she was not fearful.
- Anthony Slide: Alice Guy and Thomas Edison both made sound films, Edison slightly earlier. The big difference is that Edison would record the sound live on the set, the actors would yell to the horns to be recorded. Alice Guy prerecorded the sound.
- Julie Taymor: [commenting on "The Consequences of Feminism" 1906] Still to this day I've never seen anything like that where she has women in women's clothes and men in men's clothes and these men are acting as women and the women are acting as men. And it's revolutionary.
- Alan Williams: She was the first rate comic director. Most of her comedies have just absolute perfect comic timing.
- Joan Simon: This quote turned up on Google books about Hitchcock admiring the films of Alice Guy-Blaché. It says, "I'd be over the moon with the Frenchman Georges Méliès. I was thrilled by the movies of D.W. Griffith and the early French director Alice Guy."
- Henry Jenkins: The music video exists from the very beginning. Alice Guy clearly was part of that process.
- Naum Kleiman, Film Historian: [discussing the impact of "The Consequence of Feminism"] Sergei Eisenstein is one of the pioneers who formed Cinema. "Battleship Potemkin" made him famous in the world. You send me this film and I recognize Eisenstein's description from his memoirs. "The women rebelled. They began to frequent cafes. Talk politics. Smoke cigars. While their husbands sat at home doing the washing." Eisenstein was eight years old and at that time it was forbidden for children to see such a film. This moment was important for him. This film is the main film he mentioned. Eisenstein shot, I think also in the style a little bit of Alice Guy, in his film "October" - how he makes this ironical image of male-female.
- Alan Williams: Here is this woman who as a girl was raised in a convent and she's making these tremendously raunchy films! "The Sticky Woman", the maid is licking stamps. Her mouth becomes very sticky. This man is watching and he's getting more and more excited. Excited because this woman is licking things.
- Self - filmmaker: [1980s interview] What was she like when she was directing?
- Simone Blaché - Daughter of Alice Guy-Blaché: She was a bit authoritarian. She was so inordinary in life. So, she would have been so as a director. Her English was not good. So, it was an added difficulty in her profession. She tried to understand the people that worked with her and to work with them to get a better result.
- Tom Meyers: All these Hollywood studios have their roots in Fort Lee, New Jersey - which then was Hollywood, Version 1.0. You had Eclair, World, Fox. This was Universal Studios. You had right here the Solax studio with Alice Guy. You have Paramount.
- Alice Guy: [1964 interview] We didn't get married then, but he did ask me at that time. I told him I needed to think about it. I didn't really want to leave France. Actually, I didn't want to marry and Englishman. Englishmen aren't very nice.
- [laughs]
- Martin Scorsese: She was more than just a talented businesswoman, she was a filmmaker of rare sensitivity with a remarkably poetic eye.
- Ava DuVernay: [discussing Alice Guy-Blaché's "The Fool and his Money" 1912] I'd been asked to work with a group that was publicizing the first film with an all-African American cast. I think the film is definitely of its time. I can't say that it was entirely progressive. But, at that time, it might have regarded differently. Regardless of its intention, it was still historic in nature and important because it had the black cinematic image - which was an image that before hadn't been seen in this way.
- Ben Kingsley: Alice is a genuine storyteller. They are films about fragments of life and you realize, watching her films, how little has changed.
- Simone Blaché - Daughter of Alice Guy-Blaché: My mother was extremely French, extremely 19th Century.
- Stephen J. Ross, Author/Professor of History: Large investment firms, they want to get into the business because they see the potential for huge profits. Alice would have no chance. Wall Street money comes in the front door, women are forced out the backdoor. These women, involved in production, they get shoved out.