Rachel Howard Selects
Alice Guy-Blaché, Falling Leaves, 1912

26 May–8 June 2021

Text by Rachel Howard
May 2021

Alice Guy-Blaché, Falling Leaves, 1912
Black & white, silent, 11 min 39 sec.
CC Public Domain


Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968) was one of the first film directors in the world, almost certainly the first female director and clearly a pioneer. She was co-owner of Solax Studios, an American motion picture studio, and directed and produced 600 silent films and 150 short films with sound before moving on to feature-length films.

Falling Leaves (1912) is the story of Trixie, a little girl who tries to save Winifred, her older sister’s life by prolonging autumn having heard the family doctor say, ‘when the last leaf falls, she will have passed away.’ Winifred has tuberculosis (also known as consumption or the White Plague), one of the leading causes of death at the time. Tuberculosis is a bacterial infection spread through inhaling tiny droplets from the coughs or sneezes of an infected person. It mainly affects the lungs, but it can affect any part of the body, including the abdomen, glands, bones and nervous system (NHS, 2019). Sounds familiar. I first saw the film some years ago on YouTube, watching it through a different lens back then. Seeing it in this present pandemic, it feels somewhat more poignant and unbelievably something we can empathise with.

In a quest to save her sister’s life, Trixie gets a ball of string and goes outside and starts to tie the falling leaves on to the trees. It’s so touching and heart breaking as she flits around the garden in a white nightdress that looks so bright and angelic. Then little Trixie meets Dr Earl Headley, a Bacteriologist with a cure. She explains, ‘I am tying these leaves to keep my sister from dying.’ Needless to say he saves the day and Winifred recovers.

What struck me about the filming was the constant wide shots, as if in the theatre, and the very natural manner of the actors –– after some research I discovered that apparently the motto hanging on the Solax Studio wall for all the actors to see was ‘Act Natural.’ There are sweet moments when the child actor fleetingly glances at the camera too, which breaks the fourth wall but is very endearing. 

In the same year, Alice Guy-Blaché also directed A Fool and His Money, a silent comedy which is one of the earliest films with an all  African American cast.

— Rachel Howard, May 2021


Falling Leaves Credits

Mace Greenleaf: Dr. Earl Headley
Magda Foy: Trixie
Marion Swayne: Winifred
Blanche Cornwall: their mother
Darwin Karr: their father

Director: Alice Guy-Blaché
Art Director: Henri Menessier

Publisher: Solax Co.
Digitising sponsor: Solax Co.

We have taken reasonable steps to verify the copyright status of this work and that is it in the public domain.

Rachel Howard

British artist Rachel Howard plays with the tensions between control and chaos, order and entropy, making and unmaking, beauty and destruction. She revels in the sheer joy of her material, the intense physicality of her process grapples with notions of uncertainty, fragility, beauty and horror. Over the past 25 years, religion, repetition, mortality, madness and violence have been recurring themes in the work. A student of both Fine Art and Art History, the art of the past is as essential as the use of the endless portal of the internet, as a fresh source of constant inspiration and dialogue with the world around.

In Howard’s hands paint can be atomised, poured, smeared, scuffed, layered, sprayed, deleted and erased, to achieve the desired ‘feeling’. These sometimes unapologetically emotional paintings can be very large in scale or tiny vignettes of tragedy. Howard often displays an irreverence for her material, for example in the 90’s and early 2000’s Howard used only household gloss, wanting to humanise this functional medium used mainly for painting doors and windows. Using gravity as an invisible paintbrush to get the desired effect, it relinquished her from the piety of using a traditional oil paint and was a nod to her heroes, the abstract expressionists of the not too recent past.

The past decade has seen a return to oil paint (not revisited since her teens) and once more, a desire to use this medium in an obtuse manner. Here, the paint is sprayed and atomised over nets used as gigantic brushes, producing large alizarin crimson abstract paintings. Smaller works are built up and sanded back, then grids constructed with oil paint are unpicked and destroyed with turps, gravity and varnish creating a palimpsest, suspending the action in time. All these ‘techniques’ are utilised and invented in a quest to achieve the desired ‘feeling’.

Alice Guy-Blaché

Alice Ida Antoinette Guy-Blaché was a French pioneer filmmaker, active from the late 19th century, and one of the first to make a narrative fiction film. She was the first woman to direct a film. From 1896 to 1906, she was probably the only female filmmaker in the world.

She was artistic director and a co-founder of Solax Studios in Flushing, New York. She is known for interracial casting and experimenting with syncing sound to film, colour tinting and special effects.

On Screen Specials

On Screen Specials is a programme where invited artists previously exhibited by the Roberts Institute of Art or featured in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection select and introduce a moving image work from a fellow artist, friend or peer that they have been inspired by.