Academy Award Submission for Best Feature Documentary: ‘Be Natural: The Untold Story Of Alice Guy-Blaché’
by Peter Belsito and Sydney Levine
‘Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché’ deserves much more attention as her real life story was, and still is, a history-changer.
Filmmaker Pamela B. Green’s Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché is a timely, exhilarating rediscovery of a forgotten woman. Guy-Blaché, who made her initial film in 1896 Paris, was not only the first female filmmaker, but one of the first directors to make a narrative film. Be Natural follows her rise from Gaumont secretary to her appointment as head of production at Gaumont a year later, then her career in France and the United States as a writer, director, and/or producer of 1,000 films, both feature-length and shorts, as well as the founder of her own studio. An earlier cut of the film premiered to an enthusiastic reception at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, and subsequently played the Telluride, New York, Deauville and BFI London film festivals. Be Natural will do Oscar®-qualifying runs at the Arena Cinelounge in Los Angeles on November 23 and the Metrograph in New York City on December 7.
Developing a naturalistic style of screen performance while tackling various hot-button issues of her day — even shooting the earliest known surviving narrative film with an all-black cast — Guy-Blaché’s landmark achievements have been obscured through decades of film history focusing on male genius. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, narrated by Jodie Foster and featuring interviews with such film talents as Ava DuVernay, Patty Jenkins and Michel Hazanavicius, returns Guy-Blaché to her rightful place in the pantheon.
Alice Guy- Blaché invented fiction features as we know them today. She wrote and directed more than 1,000 films of all genres, beginning in 1896 and continuing for 20 years in Europe and the U.S. where she founded the first studio. She was then shuffled aside by the industry and her role and contributions then ignored.
It has taken director-editor Pamela B. Green (who co-wrote with Joan Simon) eight years of research and shooting to make this very comprehensive documentary. Along the way, funding through Kickstarter was enhanced by Robert Redford and Jodie Foster, who also narrates and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner lending their names as executive producers and giving significant support to the film.
Who is Alice Guy-Blaché and why has this trailblazing pioneer of the movie industry been largely forgotten? We all know that history is written by the victors and that means that men write it. To witness history itself as it was written, and to see and hear the filmmaker herself explain how her efforts to contribute her story to the history of film, is like watching a plant flower before your very eyes….it is literally viewing the remaking of history according to Her Story.
What Green has done is essentially to structure this as a detective story woven throughout with biography, autobiography, genealogy and geography, interviews and archival footage creating an astounding magnus opus.
Guy-Blaché was a contemporary of Thomas Edison, the Lumiere Brothers and Georges Méliès — all the men we have always credited with essentially inventing movies. She began in the newest profession of her day. This profession of secretary opened up jobs for the bourgeois young women who longed to integrate into the industrial world then unfolding. Guy-Blaché became a stenographer and chose her employer, Leon Gaumont, whose famed company in France was a camera manufacturing and photography supply company.
She suggested that the company create a way to distinguish it from their rival the Lumiere Brothers by using their promotional short moving pictures to tell narrative stories and in 1896 she directed the first such film, La fée aux choux aka The Fairy of the Cabbages or The Birth of Infants. She went on to become the Head of Production of the Gaumont film studio from 1897 to 1907 and experimented with Gaumont’s Chronophone sound syncing system with about 150 films, and with color tinting and special effects before Georges Méliès’ 1902 film Trip to the Moon. Her innovations in special effects included using double exposure, masking techniques, and running a film backwards. She was even doing music videos about 80 years before MTV came along.
In 1906, she made The Life of Christ, the first epic, a big budget production for the time, which included 300 extras.
When she married the trouble-shooter for Gaumont equipment, Herbert Blaché, she was required to resign from her job. In 1908 they set up Gaumont in America which they soon took over and renamed Solax Studios where she was its artistic director. It became the largest pre-Hollywood studio in America. In 1912 Solax Studios moved from Flushing, New York to Fort Lee, New Jersey where the other studios were centered until they left for Hollywood. In 1912, because white actors she had cast refused to work on screen with “colored” people, she made the film A Fool and His Money with all African-America actors, unique at that time. Other stories dealt with fictional and real issues such as immigration, child abuse, anti-Semitism, the empowerment of women and feminism, and even planned parenthood.
Emerging actors such as Lionel and Ethel Barrymore appeared in Solax films and the first incarnation of MGM, called Metro Pictures, started its business in 1916 as the distributor of Solax films. Solax also leased its state-of-the-art studios to Goldwyn Picture Corporation and Selznick International Pictures.
Using lots of zippy visual effects to bring old photographs, maps and drawings to life, as well as a generous dose of archive film by and of Guy-Blaché herself, this movie clearly explains how she became a success not just through talent and tenacity, but also by being in the right place at the right time. The case is effectively made that she invented narrative film with her very first work, La Fee aux Choux, a film that was later, like so many of her works, misattributed for years to one of her male colleagues.
Retracing Guy-Blaché’s steps from Paris to Fort Lee, N.J., to California and then back to Europe, director Green builds up a lively portrait of the Wild West of early cinema, a terrain that at first was not so hostile to women participating in it because no one took it that seriously as an art form.
It became one of the few fields then in which women like Guy-Blaché and later her protégé Lois Weber (who had an affair with Alice’s shifty husband Herbert Blaché) could be the boss, shaping a form that was considered an attraction largely for kids, women and working classes.
As is often the case, the villain of the story turns out to be capitalism and industrialization, which overtook the industry and turned it into the dream factories we’ve come to know. Naturally, as the film makes emphatically clear, there some men who screwed Guy-Blaché out of the money, recognition and credit she deserved.
But the woman herself, seen in interviews shot not long before she died in 1968 at the age of 94, remained a modest and eminently proper lady, firmly but politely insisting that what is true, is true without playing the victim in any way. Guy-Blaché was tremendously concerned with her unexplained absence from the historical record of the film industry. She was in constant communication with colleagues and film historians correcting previously made and supposedly factual statements about her life. She crafted lengthy lists of her films as she remembered them, with the hope of being able to assume creative ownership and get legitimate credit for them.
In 1953, Guy was awarded the Légion d’honneur, the highest non-military award France offers. On March 16, 1957, she was honored in a Cinématheque Française ceremony that went unnoticed by the press. Two extensive interviews with her, shot in the ’60s, present an articulate image of this pioneering woman filmmaker trying to claim her rightful place in the invention of cinema art.
Alice Guy-Blaché directed her last film in 1919. In 1921, she was forced to auction her film studio and other possessions in bankruptcy. Alice and Herbert were officially divorced in 1922 after he ran off to Hollywood with the leading lady. She returned to France in 1922 and never made a film again.
Best Documentary Feature — Official Oscar® Entries
