RetroClips

Alice Guy-Blache is arguably the first-ever narrative film director in cinema history, directing at Gaumont in France from 1896, years before D.W. Griffith is usually credited with inventing film grammar, and she went on to make well over a thousand films across her career. Almost none of them survive intact, which makes Falling Leaves a rare, precious exception. Its premise, a little girl who overhears a doctor say her sister will die when the last leaf falls and so ties the fallen leaves back onto the tree with string to cheat death, shares its central idea with O. Henry's short story The Last Leaf, published five years earlier.