March is women's history month so its a good time to remember a largely forgotten hero of cinema history, Alice Guy-Blache
At a time when movie making was in its infancy and women where regulated to the home, Alice was making revolutionary films that pioneered ideas about fictional narrative and special effects. She even ran her own studio with her husband, Solax, out of Fort Lee, New Jersey for a time. Sadly bankruptcy and divorce cause Solax to close and Blache's promising career ended in the early 1920s. The following film, The Consequences of Feminism, from 1906 is a humorous story about a topsy turvy world in which men are the subservient sex; spending time grooming and performing house hold tasks, while women take the dominant role in relationships. Blache was certainly a feminist so I imagine this film is meant to poke fun abut mens fears regarding the women's rights.
Today marks the anniversary of the birth of a vintage style icon whose name has mostly faded from memory but whose image lingers on. Camille Clifford, known as the original Gibson girl (June 29, 1885-June 28, 1971). During the early days of the 20th century an American Graphic artist named Charles Dana Gibson, began drawing a new sort of female beauty for advertisements and magazine articles. The girls in his illustration became known as Gibson girls. Gibson girls where beautiful and curvaceous, but they also enjoyed an equal, or almost equal footing, with men. Gibson girls where shown reading, riding bikes, golfing, and often being slavishly doted on by men.
Gibson used many models for his drawings, but in the early 1900s a modeling contest to find a living embodiment of the Gibson girl ideal was held, and Camille Clifford was the winner. At that point she became an icon of Edwardian beauty, the perfect Gibson girl. Clifford worked as a model and an actress, in non speaking roles, for only a few years, but the many remaining pictures of her are a testament to her popularity and beauty.
