Series Site
This series offers a chance to see works by four pioneering directors of the silent era: Alice Guy-Blaché, Louis Feuillade, Cecil B. DeMille, and Lois Weber. Guy-Blaché’s career in film began at age twenty-one, when she worked for Léon Gaumont, an engineer and visionary who founded Gaumont Studios, in Paris. There she was allowed initially to use the studio facilities to make small films in addition to her job as stenographer. Her tenure at Gaumont lasted for eleven years, and she produced many innovative works that helped define the new language of cinema. In 1907 she and her husband, Herbert Blaché, moved to the United States. By 1910 she founded her own film production company, Solax Films, in New Jersey, where she produced a wide variety of films: comedies, melodramas, military adventures, and fairy tales, serving as director and editor on most of these projects. When she left for the United States, Guy-Blaché handed off direction at Gaumont Studios to Feuillade, who would direct landmark serial crime films such as Fantômas, Les vampires, and Judex, all made between 1913 and 1916. At this same time in Hollywood, DeMille was establishing his position as the founding father of American cinema. His early silent film The Cheat was acclaimed for its use of cinematic style. Another pillar of this period, Weber, one of the first American auteurs, would go on to be the first American female director to open her own movie studio.
Anne Nesbet, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Film & Media at UC Berkeley, will give short lectures for the film programs on September 18 and 25, when the students of her Film 10 class will be in attendance with the general public. Both programs are presented with live piano accompaniment by Judith Rosenberg.
—Susan Oxtoby, Director of Film and Senior Film Curator