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This intriguing documentary shines a light on the astonishing career of the first woman to direct a film – and possibly the first director ever

Pamela B Green’s hectic, garrulous, fascinating documentary recovers the story of French film-maker Alice Guy-Blaché (working from Alison McMahan’s book Alice Guy-Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema). She was a hugely important pioneer of early cinema who was the first woman to direct a feature film – perhaps the first director ever – a figure admired by Eisenstein and Hitchcock, and a prolific director, screenwriter, producer and prototypical studio chief who helped invent the idiom of modern movie-making. The notice “Be Natural” on the wall of her Solax studio in New Jersey was a testament to her belief that, however stylised and generic, acting and films in general should not be bizarre pantomimes but artworks connected to the real world.

The documentary is narrated by its producer Jodie Foster,...

There’s an alarming degree of disingenuousness, or perhaps merely naiveté, permeating “Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché.” To begin with, there’s that title, “The Untold Story,” which ignores a number of earlier documentaries not to mention the significant amount of scholarship on pioneering filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché. Also omitted is any mention of the 2009 Gaumont and Kino DVD box sets that made 66 of her films available. These are what can be called inconvenient truths, for Pamela B. Green, director of “Be Natural,” is on a mission to discover why — supposedly — no one has ever heard of Alice Guy-Blaché.

As Green tells it, the reason is pure and simple: Because she was a woman, Guy-Blaché was written out of the history books. That’s not entirely wrong. Alice Guy, as she was then known, was present at the very start of the film industry and played a crucial...