Be Natural: The Untold Story Of Alice Guy-Blaché

Cannes ’18 Review by Peter Belsito

This may be the best film I saw at Cannes and is largely unknown as is its subject. The female director this film is about largely invented filmmaking as we know it and directed 1000 plus films of all types beginning in the 1890s and continuing for 20 years in Europe and the US. She was then shuffled aside by the industry and her role and contributions then ignored.

This new film about her was directed, edited and co-written (with Joan Simon) by Emmy-nominated Pamela B. Green and largely funded with Kickstarter and sympathetic movers and shakers like Redford (whose Wildwood Enterprises is listed as a production company) and the late Hefner, a film aficionado.

It would seem irresistible, and even prominently features Academy President John Bailey (charmingly going in search of one of the first movie cameras) among its many interviewees and participants.

But who is Alice Guy-Blaché and why has this trailblazing pioneer of the movie industry been largely forgotten, her important historical contributions rewritten by men over the decades, her films gone with the wind?

What Green has done is essentially structure this as a detective story wrapped up as a biopic and it all works in a movie that had me astounded by the time it ended.

Guy-Blaché was a contemporary of Thomas Edison, the Lumieres and Melies — all the men we have always credited with essentially inventing movies.

After starting as a secretary to Leon Gaumont at his famed company in France, she was elevated to writer, director and producer of over 1,000 films, from her first narrative movie in 1896 and for the next 20 years.

She even became the equivalent of a powerful studio executive who was there when all the majors started in Fort Lee, NJ.

She did about 150 of her films with synchronized sound decades before talkies came in, and even had tinted color in many of them.

Essentially she also invented the concept of story in film and told human tales that had never been seen and were way ahead of their time in dealing with topics like immigration, child abuse, the empowerment of women and feminism, and even planned parenthood.

One of her films is in fact the earliest surviving movie with an all-black cast which was out of necessity since the white actors she had cast refused to work on screen with “colored” people at the time. She was even doing music videos about 80 years before MTV came along.

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-Blache herself, the film 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.

Hired to be a secretary for inventor Leon Gaumont, she was one of the very first people to see the cinematic apparatus devised by the Lumiere Brothers and to spot how the medium could be used to film more than just people leaving a factory or other documentary subjects.

There’s a good case to be made that she invented narrative film with her very first work, La Fee aux Choux (The Cabbage 1896) . a film that was later, like so many of her works, misattributed for years to one of her male colleagues.

Retracing her 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-Blache and later Lois Weber (who had an affair with Alice’s shifty husband Herbert Blache) 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 were also a fair few men who screwed Guy-Blache out of the money, recognition and credit she deserved.

But the woman herself, seen in interviews shot not long before she died, remained a modest and eminently proper lady, firmly but politely insisting that what is true, is true without playing the victim in any way. These interviews, shot in the ‘60’s, present an articulate image of this pioneering woman filmmaker trying to claim her rightful place in the invention of cinema art.

ISA: The Film Sales Company