Rated: G
Written, Directed and Produced by: Pamela B. Green
Co-Written by: Joan Simon (Writer, Executive Producer)
Executive Produced by: John Ptak, Joan Simon, Geralyn Dreyfous
Narrated by: Jodie Foster
Cast Including: Alice Guy-Blaché, Patty Jenkins, Diablo Cody, Ben Kingsley, Geena Davis, Ava DuVernay, Michel Hazanavicius, and Julie Delpy.
Be Natural is an investigative biography, taking writer and director Pamela Green eight years to piece together the life of one of the first director’s of film: Alice Guy-Blaché.
Most enthusiasts, film professionals and critics will sight the Lumiéne brothers. The responses will vary. Rarely will the name Alice Guy-Blaché be mentioned.
The documentary is shown like a mystery, while asking the question – was she overlooked in the history books because she was the first female director? Writing, producing or directing 1,000 films, then going on to build her own studio, Solax in the U.S, alongside the likes of Paramount Pictures and Universal, how has this titan of the industry been forgotten?
Greene sets about investigating, showing her search with animated maps tracing her travels; the conversations with sources from Alice’s relatives, to archives and museums, while travelling to France, Brussels and through-out the United States.
We’re taken on the journey as each detail is revealed and highlighted with the red outline of a magnifying glass as narrator, Jodie Foster, details the findings, to cut to interviews of actors, directors, relatives and found footage of an interview with Alice herself, giving insight into the difficulties she had, not as a film maker, but to get credit for her own work.
The documentary travels back in time, to Alice’s beginnings, to her first job as a secretary working for Léon Gaumont, where at 23, she was to make one of the first narrative films ever made, La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy) (1869).
This was a time when film was first invented, the company Alice worked for in France, Gaumont Film Company, selling cameras to the scientists, the inventors, to the leaders of their industry; where anything new or different was recorded like a stock shot – the ocean rolling in and tourist attractions from around the world.
There was no thought of using film to tell a story.
The general consensus was that film would pass as a fad.
For a woman to have such control was unnoticed because no one thought filmmaking would last. Alice was able to find a place in the industry.
So how is it that no one has heard of Alice Guy-Blaché? How did she get forgotten?
Even though Alice wrote her own memoirs, and that she corrected the historians time and again, her body of work was mostly lost leaving silence around her phenomenal success.
I felt the injustice, not because Alice was a female film maker, but because one of the pioneers of film-making had been so completely overlooked.
Historical documentaries aren’t my usual go-to for movie watching; yet, Greene has gone to great lengths to keep the sheer volume of information clear and interesting.
Using montages and layered screens and unique ways of showing shots of photos held by relatives; magazines thrown, one on top of the other, and the slicing of Alice’s films to show her work, kept the investigation moving like a quick wit (rather than a dry news story).
I could see the huge amount of information Greene managed to amass, the amount of work and effort obvious in getting history right this time. To give Alice, finally, her due.
Just one of her many moments of forward thinking, we learn that Alice had notes all over her studio, including a large sign, Be Natural. ‘That’s all I asked of them,’ she says of her actors.
And in the end all Alice wanted was acknowledgement of her work.
For those interested in cinematic history, this documentary is a gift. For those not looking for a history lesson, this is a doco that is more investigative, more about the revealing of a mystery shown in an interesting and clever way.
Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968)