If the Lumières are “the fathers of cinema,” then of course we can set Alice Guy against them, but I don’t think that should be the way out we’re looking for.

The last weekend before the pandemic took hold of Istanbul was spent in feminist celebration. As the Türkiye branch of the Women and Film History International team, together with Elif Rongen-Kaynakçı and hosted by Buse Yıldırım, we put together a two-day program of events at Beykoz Kundura to commemorate women’s film history.

Elif is the silent film curator at Eye Filmmuseum in the Netherlands. She is also an archivist who has devoted more than twenty years of her life to finding lost films, restoring them and making them available to researchers and film lovers. She focuses not only on the films that are the cornerstones of cinema history, but also on the work of the forgotten or neglected women of silent cinema. Elif, who works for many international silent film festivals, above all the Istanbul Silent Film Days, has curated programs of films shot in Ottoman lands around the turn of the twentieth century under the title Images from the Ottoman Empire, and has presented them in many cities around the world.

Since we had come together for the program on the weekend of March 7 and 8, we also wanted to do an interview with Elif for 5Harfliler. One of the focal points of the program was Alice Guy-Blaché, one of the very first filmmakers and widely regarded as the first woman director, about whom a new documentary was recently made. This documentary, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (Turkish title: Doğal Ol: Alice Guy-Blaché’nin Bilinmeyen Hikayesi; Pamela B. Green, 2018), was screened online just recently, on June 13, as part of the Filmmor Women’s Film Festival. For our part, on March 7 we had screened the documentary on Alice Guy-Blaché made by Katja Raganelli in 1997.

We named the March 7–8 program “Pioneering Women of Cinema” in order to tackle the oddity of a canon shaped by auteurs – known as writer-directors – who, with few exceptions, are overwhelmingly men. Yet when it comes to a collective form of art and experience such as cinema, we both ran the program and began this interview with the idea that singling out particular names, and the very notion of the “auteur,” need to be problematized.

Shall we begin with the problems of foregrounding the names and life stories of some women while passing over others?

Elif: Yes, Alice Guy-Blaché plays an important role here, too. Since the Lumière brothers, the “inventors of cinema,” are constantly talked about as ‘these two brothers, geniuses in this way and that,’ a film with a “mother of cinema” narrative can be set against that. Perhaps it even should be, but there is something fundamentally troubling about this way of talking, this approach – as if one person emerged all alone and did everything single-handedly. That kind of narrative is at odds with the very essence of cinema anyway, isn’t it? Cinema is teamwork. You might say this – though I’m not so sure about that either – about a painter, for example. Perhaps a painter shuts themselves away in the studio and creates alone. Even that, I think, isn’t very realistic. That painter, too, is inevitably someone influenced by the society they live in, by their colleagues and by other intellectuals. But let’s say that, technically, working alone is possible there. You shut yourself in your room, set your canvas in front of you and withdraw into seclusion. In cinema, that is technically impossible. You simply can’t make a film on your own. So I think it’s absurd to talk about cinema this way. This narrative satisfies a need for a hero, the search for a creator, an artist, a genius…

In the literature, and even in conversations about film, auteur directors are assumed to be men of genius, aren’t they?

Elif: Yes, but where did this discourse come from? Where did it come from, and why was it grafted onto cinema? We should be questioning these things from the very start. Otherwise we end up having to deal with the misunderstandings and the strange discourses it gives rise to. Instead of talking about how to move beyond this narrative, we find ourselves busy looking for counterexamples to it. As if to say, if the Lumières were geniuses in 1895, let’s find a female genius of that time to set against them… If that’s how the Lumières are, then of course we can set Alice Guy against them, but I don’t think that should be the way out we’re looking for. We should take a different route: while trying to clarify the role of women, we should at the same time spread the idea that cinema is teamwork. Otherwise, the prejudices and misinformation already in people’s minds will only lead to even more confusion. Whereas, as we clear the way, we should also be doing away with certain other prejudices… This is a difficult task, because some things have become deeply entrenched.

Yes, ever since the French New Wave of the 1960s, the notion of the auteur director has shaped conversations about cinema. Not to mention film journalism, which began by turning patriarchal figures such as Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles into heroes.

Elif: That’s only natural. Film writers and directors are people who know each other; of course they will praise a film made by their own friend, the friend they share drinks with at the tavern in the evening. Perhaps they even talked through the idea of the film together, right? That’s human nature, nothing surprising about it. What makes it wrong is when someone completely removed from that milieu, a writer in another country, reads it and repeats it without ever seeing it in a critical context. They don’t consider that the director had already sat down and discussed it many times with their writer friend – practically made the film together, even. So we ought to see that context, but after so much time has passed we may not be able to. Today, for example, it’s still possible to know who Tarantino worked with and what inspired him while making one of his films. But it’s important to grasp that we can’t see this when we look back through history. On the other hand, perhaps there’s also something nice about a hundred years ago: we can do in-depth research. We can look at first-hand correspondence, for example, rather than citing a book as the sole source just because it happened to be published…

The way this information multiplies through repetition, even when it is incomplete or wrong, is also important. Doesn’t this easy way out also keep women, or subalterns, from entering history and becoming known?

Elif: Of course, but only until things are explored and researched in depth. We have a very clear example of this kind of rewriting of history: Filibus (Italy, 1915). The only copy of the film is with us, in the Desmet collection; if I remember correctly, we brought it to light in 1989, Filibus having been considered a lost film. Once it became clear that it was the only copy, our institution restored it and screened it at festivals, but from then on, both in our catalog and in the catalogs of those festivals, the actress in Filibus was listed as Cristina Ruspoli. And until two years ago we never once questioned that information. I acknowledge our own mistake here, too; that’s what our catalog said. And Italian sources say the same.

Could you tell us a little about the discovery of Filibus and the story of the film?

Elif: Three years ago, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival told us it would be giving Eye Filmmuseum, as an institution, an award in the field of silent cinema and restoration. After saying I would go to accept the award on the institution’s behalf, I asked them to screen Filibus at the award ceremony. They didn’t yet know Filibus, but I had a feeling this film would fit our times perfectly. And here’s the proof: ever since that day, the film has been screened somewhere in the world every month, and it will soon be out on DVD. Because in the film a single actress plays three roles at once, and the protagonist is a mysterious female pirate who flies through the air. It’s like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (Anthony E. Zuiker, 2000–2015) and Mission: Impossible (Brian De Palma, 1996) rolled into one, or perhaps a bit like Sherlock Holmes.

To read the rest of the interview, you can visit the 5 Harfliler website.