My Name Is Alice Guy

Abstract

Founded in Paris in October 1973, the feminist collective “Musidora,” which was named for the actress, director, screenwriter, and film critic Jeanne Roques, also known as Musidora, was instrumental in generating new interest in women’s film history. This essay examines the collective Musidora’s speculative approaches to the first woman filmmaker, Alice Guy Blaché, by way of Nicole-Lise Bernheim’s short film Qui est Alice Guy? (Who Is Alice Guy?, 1976). Its focus lies in particular in how the members of the Musidora collective, which often represented Guy Blaché in their image, as a strong independent woman struggling to be recognized as a filmmaker in France, transformed Guy Blaché into a feminist figure of French film history through speculative means. In doing so, the collective Musidora reveals not our limited knowledge of the past, but rather the possibilities of changing the present through both historiographical and fictional means.