When she directed The Empress in 1917, Alice Guy-Blaché was no longer heading Solax, the production company she had created with her husband in 1910 in the United States after leaving Paris, where she had managed the Gaumont film studio from 1902 to 1907. Despite her successes, several factors led to the closure of the Blaché studio: the outbreak of war in Europe, which disrupted global film production, and a drastic change in the organization of American cinema, becoming increasingly centralized, which made the work of independents like Solax difficult.
However, the Blaché couple resisted: they rented out their facilities to other productions and wrote and directed films for other companies. It was during this period that Alice Guy directed major silent film stars like Olga Petrova, Alla Nazimova, and Bessie Love. Only three feature films, unfortunately incomplete, remain from this rich period of Alice Guy's filmography: The Ocean's Waif (1916), The Empress (1917), and The Great Adventure (1918). The Empress, directed for Popular Plays and Players with Doris Kenyon in the lead role, is preserved at the Cinémathèque Française.
The film gives us a glimpse of themes dear to Alice Guy-Blaché: the relationships between an artist and his muse, manipulation and jealousy, as well as the importance of photographic technologies altering our relationship to truth. Finally, it is a film that portrays female solidarity, often present in her films. Indeed, in The Empress, it is the almost sensual complicity between two women, “the woman in the shadows” (Lyn Donelson) and Nedra (Doris Kenyon), that saves the latter from an untimely death.
(Clara Auclair)
