Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Alice Guy-Blaché night


Tonight, TCM is shining a spotlight on pioneering director Alice Guy-Blaché, who deserves the "pioneer" label not just for being one of the first female directors, but because she was working at the dawn of film when, well, everybody was a pioneer of sorts. There's apparently a documentary on her that came out last year called Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, and that's airing tonight at 8:00 PM, with a repeat at midnight for those of you on the west coast.

In between there are several of her shorts, most of them two-reelers, although I don't necessarily know if you should call them shorts since it's not as if feature-length movies as we know them today were being produced. I've mentioned Algie the Miner before, and that one is airing, according to the TCM schedule page, at 2:35 AM. As always, however, when TCM programs a block of shorts like this, I'm never quite certain of the exact start times. I've also mentioned Falling Leaves (10:00 PM) before, which is worth mentioning in these times because of the theme of a patient with tuberculosis and other characters not quite following medical protocol.

But the one I'm going to embed a video of is the "epic" Birth, Life and Death of Christ, which purports to tell the story of Jesus in a series of vignettes, the epic lasting about 34 minutes, which was pretty darn long for 1906. It's in the public domain, of course, and there are several prints available on Youtube:

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