Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché

I went to see this film following a strong review in Melbourne (Australia). However, I thought that it was very poorly assembled as a film. It seemed that the film's makers were keen to include absolutely everything they could find, and the choice of order for all these clips was baffling as well as non-stop. I will be the first in the queue to see another film made to cover the astonishing life of Alice Guy-Blache - she deserves better than this attempt.

There is so much talk of the Hollywood Boys' Club and the lack of diversity right now. Anyone who cares should see this movie, about an early pioneer in the movies. A great untold story.

One evening in Paris in March of 1895, cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière hosted a special event, the very first public screening of projected motion pictures. In the audience that night were Leon Gaumont, maker of cameras and photographic equipment, and his secretary, 21 year-old Alice Guy. What they saw were "actualities," basic documentary works that were brief and simple, such as the now-familiar scene of workers leaving the Lumière factory. Guy was impressed, but felt the subject matter could be improved upon. So she sought permission from her employer to make her own motion pictures -- ones that told stories -- and it was granted. Her film-making career was underway.

The Gaumont concern became a motion picture plant, and from 1896 to 1906 Alice Guy was the company's head of production. Dozens of short films were made under her direction, in every genre: comedies, dramas, fantasies, Biblical epics, and even Westerns. She experimented with special effects, including double-exposure and synchronized sound. She married Herbert Blaché in 1907 and the two worked together, first in France and then in the U.S. They co-founded the Solax Company on the East Coast; Alice now ran her own studio.

She continued making films of all kinds, including features, eventually in Hollywood. But for a number of reasons, both personal and professional, the filmmaking career of Alice Guy-Blaché came to a premature halt shortly after the First World War. She returned to France in 1922 and made no more films. And for the rest of her long life, Guy-Blaché struggled to establish her place in motion picture annals. This proved to be a battle, for most of her films were lost or unavailable, and film historians tended to overlook her achievements or ascribe them to others.

Pamela Green's fascinating new documentary should help rectify the injustice done to this pioneer. I happened to see it the same weekend I caught Peter Bogdanovich's new Buster Keaton documentary, and the difference between the two is striking. While I enjoyed the Keaton tribute, it's traditional in every way, following the standard format for such works as it cuts back and forth between film excerpts, photos, and interviews. And of course, Keaton's life story and his comedies are familiar to buffs. But Green, whose subject is far more obscure, takes a more audacious approach: she gives us not only biographical material about Guy-Blaché, complete with the expected footage and photos, but also details her own efforts to dig up material on Alice Guy-Blaché and complete the documentary. This is illustrated throughout with lively animated graphics, which help clarify complicated details and keep the viewer engaged.

Happily, in addition to the excerpts from Guy-Blaché's films, Green also found two interviews with the filmmaker from her later years. It's fascinating to hear the woman herself discuss her life and career. We get the sense she was somewhat frustrated but nonetheless even-tempered and philosophical about setbacks as she describes her ongoing efforts to locate her surviving work and establish her claim as a genuine pioneer. A videotaped interview with Guy-Blaché's daughter conducted in the 1980s helps fill in some of the gaps.

In sum, this is a captivating story, told in a fresh, innovative fashion. It's must for anyone interested in the birth of the motion picture as an art form and an industry.

Greetings again from the darkness. History can easily be distorted by those who tell it. But the work and deeds of those who make history stands the test of time, and research can often right a wrong ... or at least provide credit where it's due. Such is the case with Pamela B Greene's project to uncover the truth, and finally give pioneer filmmaker Alice Guy-Blache her rightful place in the history of cinema.

Numerous familiar faces from the movie industry flash across the screen, and most admit they have never heard of Alice Guy-Blache. Even the few that recognize the name, don't know her story. This is how the movie starts ... letting off the hook those of us who pride ourselves on knowing the basics of cinema's origins. In 1895, the Lumiere Brothers presented the first short films on their newly developed Cinematographe. In the audience that day were Leon Gaumont and his assistant, Alice Guy.

Young Ms. Guy had a creative vision for this fascinating new technology. Rather than filming "real life", she would tell stories. And telling stories through moving pictures is exactly what she did more than 1000 times across two decades and two countries. In 1896, she directed THE CABBAGE FAIRY, one of the first narrative films ... and it was only the beginning for her. Director Greene explains that so many of those early films are lost, despite being described as sophisticated, emotional, and engaging works. As she moved from France to the United States (New Jersey), Alice founded Solax with her husband, and began experimenting with sound, special effects, gender roles, and story structure.

It's truly fascinating to see the clips from many of her films, along with snippets from interviews she sat for in 1964 (before passing away in 1968). Director Greene also includes interviews from Alice's daughter Simone, while I believe are from the 1980's. Simone is able to fill in some of the gaps in the historical timeline ... a timeline that includes many familiar names. It's also a timeline that results in an abrupt end to Alice's filmmaking when she relocates back to France after the war.

How did Alice Guy-Blache get lost in history? She was a contemporary of Melies, Lumiere and the Pathe brothers. She was not just the first woman director, she was also one of the first film directors, period. Though the search continues for many of her films, Oscar winning actress Jodie Foster narrates the mission of filmmaker Pamela B Greene to right a wrong ... Alice must no longer be forgotten by the industry she helped create.

From the excellent opening collage to the concluding remaking of her films, this is a fine documentary introduction to the career and life of the first female director (and writer, producer and studio head, etc.) and one of the first important filmmakers in general in history, Alice Guy--responsible for the earliest films of one of the biggest studio's in early cinema, Gaumont, including their early sound pictures, the founding of Solax productions at Fort Lee, New Jersey, and becoming an independent filmmaker in Hollywood after the Edison Trust monopolized the business on the East Coast. Through her memoir, interviews and other work, she was also responsible for the telling of her own story and significance in cinema history. This last aspect is especially well rendered in "Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché," which takes an investigatory approach to the piecing together of her narrative. Even the genealogical stuff fits well here and adds to the picture, and the filmmakers wisely didn't conceal the imprint of modern technology on the documentary, including work and communication via computers and the web--the sketch style, or "cinema of attractions" mode, of early cinema is even compared at one point to the infancy of YouTube videos. After all, Guy got her start in the business--rising from the ranks of secretary--because of her and the company's dealings with and fascination for technological innovation.

The story of her filmmaking career begins with the Lumière Brothers' demonstration of their Cinématographe to others in the photographic industry, including Léon Gaumont and Guy, on 22 March 1895, as opposed to the more-celebrated public screening 28 December 1895. The opening collage does a wonderful job of leading up to this moment, by moving back in time--representing the history of Hollywood movies, back through Fort Lee and Paris and with a brief overview of other pre-cinema and early cinema pioneers. I find it easy to overlook any deficiencies in the history here, consequently, because this collage does so well to indicate that Guy, or Gaumont or the Lumières and anyone else, for that matter, is a part of this long tapestry.

I'm beginning to retrace my own investigation of Guy's career, so I found this documentary an especially nice refresher on the subject. Among the new things I learned (or re-learned) was the Kinora footage dated to 1895 by the Lumières featuring Guy self-reflexively playing with the flip-book-like, motion-picture contraption. It's a fascinating bit of footage that complements nicely "Alice Guy Films a 'Phonoscène'" (1905). There's also the extension of Guy's influence to the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and Sergei Eisenstein, the latter who wrote specifically about Guy's "The Consequences of Feminism" (1906). I also don't recall having heard that besides Guy and her husband, Herbert Blaché, hiring America's first female director, Lois Weber, that "Mrs. Smalley" was allegedly also one of Herbert's mistresses. Make of that rumor regarding the evangelist filmmaker of such films as "Hypocrites" (1915) what you will, I suppose. A more amusing anecdote details how Guy checked for fingerprints on her scripts to catch the thief giving them to competing studios. Indeed, early cinema was rife with imitation, including by Guy (and Georges Méliès, Edwin S. Porter, Ferdinand Zecca, etc.), and flat-out plagiarism and bootlegging. Some were probably worse than others, though. Pathé could especially be notoriously successful at this, and, here, their "The Policemen's Little Run" is cited as a copy of Gaumont's "The Race for the Sausage" (both from 1907).

Guy is also credited with making one of the first films to feature an all African-American cast, "A Fool and His Money" (1912), although I would think claims of its primacy would need to contend with similar claims for the now-lost "The Railroad Porter" (1912), which also was directed by an African American, let alone "Something Good - Negro Kiss" (1898). Certainly, however, Guy is among the first, if not the very first, in accomplishing a great deal in film history. The most contentious of which, and to bring up the biggest of my slight problems with the documentary, is her claim of making the first story film, that of the cabbage patch.

Despite claiming to be based on Alison McMahan's book on Alice Guy-Blaché, the movie doesn't do justice to the uncertainty surrounding this film, or, rather, films. The earliest Cabbage-Patch Fairy film we have today is usually dated to c.1900 (except for on the web, where, frankly, many don't know what they're talking about) and credited to the Gaumont studio, but it's not known with certainty whether Guy made it (although I would guess she did, given the film's similarity to the rest of her oeuvre and her predominance at Gaumont) or whether it could be a copy of a 58mm film dating back to 1896. McMahan suggests it could be a remake, whether based on a hypothetical 1896 film or not, or the original film that Guy spoke of in interviews and her memoir. Meanwhile, Jane M. Gaines in her book "Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?" does well to cast doubt on it being a film from 1896. The documentary contesting (and by Wikipedia, among other sites, following suit), without offering evidence, that the earliest Cabbage-Patch Fairy film we have today is a remake of an 1896 production seems a simplification of the issue, at the least.

Complicating this further, as Gaines, McMahan and others have pointed out, is that Guy's descriptions actually better match her 1902 Cabbage-Patch Fairy film, "Midwife to the Upper Class" (although Guy, in an interview, disputed the "midwife" part of that title), which is a two-scene narrative film as she described, as opposed to the one shot-scene "cinema of attractions" mode of the c.1900 film. The photograph shown in the documentary of Guy next to a couple actors, while in the past attributed to the alleged 1896 production and dated rather confusingly in the movie, seems to clearly be from the 1902 film, too. Never mind, either, that there were similarly fictional productions before 1896, including the Lumière Brothers' "The Sprayer Sprayed" (1895). As mentioned in the documentary, the cabbage-patch plot also returned in Guy's "Madame's Cravings" (1907), so the director returned to this scenario based in a fable on childbirth multiple times, for sure, if not known precisely how many times she returned to it or always when. None of which takes away from the other qualities of the films, but the confusion and mystery is a good reminder that much of the history of early cinema has been lost and that, to an extent, the story of Alice Guy-Blaché remains untold.