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Before George Melier shot a rocket at the moon,

before Edwin Porter staged the great train robbery,

after Moibridge captured a horse's feet leaving the ground, and Edison put subjects in a black box like medical specimens.

After the Lumiere brothers caught the train rolling into the station.

But before there were any theaters to show their work,

and the movie business, as we know it, was only a spark in the collective imagination.

Alice Gee, the first and for 17 years only female film director,

shot her first picture, a fantasy landscape with babies coming out of cabbages.

She wanted to be known as the first female film director.

And she was.

The Lumiere brothers projected their first motion picture on the wall in 1895,

and she starred in 1896.

My name is Janelle Dietrich and I've been researching Alice Gie Blaschet for about seven years

and I've written four books about her.

Now five.

She did the first actual story film which is ridiculous in a minute to do a story. I mean, now you are

used to it. You watch the commercials on TV, and it's incredible what a story they can tell

in 30 seconds or a minute.

Our story continues after this message. But nobody thought you could do it, and that changed the

landscape.

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