When you think about the titans of classic film, who comes to mind? Go ahead, take a few minutes.

No matter how long your list, it’s a fair bet that the French filmmaker Alice Guy Blaché — one of cinema’s earliest and most influential pioneers — didn’t make the cut.

Until recently, Guy Blaché was mostly relegated to the footnotes: credited regularly as the first female filmmaker (when credited at all), but overlooked in terms of her impact as an artist and an innovator. And yet starting in 1896, she made around 1,000 films, constantly pushing visual and thematic boundaries. She experimented with early synchronized sound, color and special effects. She explored gender, race and class. And she inspired future giants like Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock and Agnès Varda.