International Womens Day 2023 -- March 8, 2023

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Happy International Women's Day, everyone. 

#InternationalWomensDay #EmbraceEquity

International Womens Day 2022 -- March 8, 2022

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Happy International Women's Day, everyone. #InternationalWomensDay #BreakTheBias

Actress, screenwriter, producer and director Dorothy Davenport was usually billed as Mrs Wallace Reid after her husband died at a tragically young age in 1923. This probably helped to sell the movies she directed.

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Film Daily Yearbook, 1925

International Women's Day, 2020 -- March 8, 2020

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Happy International Women's Day. #InternationalWomensDay

Alice Guy-Blaché was the head of production for the Gaumont company from 1897 to 1907. If she was not the first movie director, she was one of the first.

She directed hundreds of movies, ranging from actualities and one of the many serpentine dances recorded by different companies in 1897, to single-scene comic bits and vaudeville turns, to 1905 sound-on-disc Chronophones to a 1906 33 minute life of Christ, to developed dramatic stories. Alice Guy married Herbert Blaché and moved to America, where she directed for Gaumont, then started her own company, Solax.

The first disc of the Gaumont Treasures set features the films of Alice Guy-Blaché.

Alice Guy-Blaché stopped directing in 1919. She divorced Herbert in 1922 and returned to France.

She returned to the US in 1964 to live with her daughter. She died in New Jersey.

Ten years after she died, I heard and read her name in an introduction to film class, but there was very little information about her and we didn't see any of her movies. Over the last twenty years or so, scholars and archivists have dug up much more information about her.

Motion Picture News, 29-January-1916

Moving Picture World, 28-March-1914

"Staged under the personal direction of Alice Guy-Blaché."

International Womens Day, 2019 -- March 8, 2019

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Happy International Womens Day. #InternationalWomensDay

For many years in the 1930s and the early 1940s, Dorothy Arzner was the only woman who directed films in Hollywood.  Women are still underrepresented.