Alice & Eiffel: A New History of Early Cinema and the Love Story Kept Secret for a Century (The Life and Work of Alice Guy Blaché Book 3)

Alice Guy Blaché became the first film director in 1896 while she was working in Paris at Gaumont, one of the earliest manufacturers of the motion picture camera. The first films were only a minute long and thought to be scientific novelties until Alice decided to stage a scene and film a narrative.

Gustave Eiffel was president of the Gaumont company from its inception in 1895, but Alice did not meet him there. For a century, Eiffel has been thought to be merely a silent partner in the Gaumont company, but in fact he guided the company from its inception. While president during its first eleven years, he advanced both the business and technology of the motion picture.
For eleven years, Alice made films in Paris and then in 1907 she came to the United States, where she wrote and directed hundreds of longer films in New York and Fort Lee, New Jersey, before Hollywood became the center of the film industry.
Alice wrote a memoir that was published in 1976. Her relationship to Eiffel and the role he played in her life is alluded to but well camouflaged. The brevity of Alice’s memoirs, little more than a hundred pages, has flummoxed researchers for decades. This book is about what Alice’s memoirs leave out―the people introduced but not described, the difficulties alluded to but minimized, the losses and triumphs barely mentioned, and the love story she felt compelled to keep secret. https://www.amazon.com/Alice-Eiffel-History-Cinema-Century