Directed by Pamela B. Green
Where & When: Los Feliz 3, Los Angeles, CA. May 7, 2019 1:30 PM
At the start of "Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché", Pamela B. Green's fascinating documentary, various people who work in the film industry are asked if they had ever heard of Alice Guy-Blaché. Almost none of them had (director Ava DuVernay was the exception) and after discovering her important contributions to early cinema, they were shocked and dismayed that they were not aware of Ms Guy-Blaché. With narration by Jodie Foster, Ms Green reveals all of the amazing accomplishments of this French film making pioneer and tries to unravel the mystery of exactly why her name had faded in to obscurity.
Following the death of her father in 1891, an eighteen-year old Alice Guy trained to become a typist and stenographer to help her widowed mother. She was hired as a secretary by Felix-Max Richard who owned a photography supply company. A few years later, Richard had to sell the company and it went to the team of Gustave Eiffel (yes, the man who designed the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty), Joseph Vallot, Alfred Besnier, and Léon Gaumont, which the company was renamed after. Moving pictures was just beginning and Gaumont and Co. would become a major player in the creation and distribution of film in France.
While Alice was still working as a secretary for the company, she would become familiar with production, marketing and camera lenses. The films being made at the time were largely for experimental purposes and promotion to sell camera equipment. After seeing Louis Lumière's forty-six second documentary, "Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon" in 1895 (and is considered one of the first motion pictures ever made), Guy was convinced she could bring story-telling elements to film.
With Gaumont's permission, Alice made her first film, "La Fée aux Choux (The Fairy of the Cabbages)" in 1896 which was based on a classic French fairy tale in which baby boys are born in cabbages. She would become the studio's head of production and made hundreds of short films that included melodramas, dance, comedies and westerns. By 1906, Guy wrote and directed a big-budget feature, "The Life of Christ" which featured hundreds of extras and made use for the first time of special effects like double exposure and running the film backwards.
Alice would marry Herbert Blaché in 1907 and they headed to America where he would become the production manager for Gaumont's operations in New York. But three years later, the couple and their business partner, George A. Magie would form their own movie studio, The Solax Company. The studio became successful and invested in a large state-of-the-art new studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey. This is where Guy-Blaché placed a large sign that stated, "Be Natural" which was to serve as a reminder for her actors to keep their performances down to Earth.
You can see Ms Green's extensive background in creating movie main-title designs and motion graphics in her feature documentary debut with several clever animated charts and sequences in "Be Natural". She had first learned about Ms Guy-Blaché in a television documentary on trailblazing women in film back in 2000 and has worked ever since in bringing awareness to this early director's life and career. As one of the very few female filmmakers, Guy-Blaché took on some very uncommon subjects in cinema at the time involving race, gender politics, feminism, immigration and spousal abuse. She made a 1906 comedy short, "The Consequences of Feminism" which focuses on men and women swapping their societal roles and "A Fool and His Money", which was made in 1912 and is widely considered to be the first feature film with an entire African-American cast.
History has done a great disservice to Alice Guy-Blaché in regards to her rightful place in the invention of our modern cinema. Due to a changing movie-business and blatant sexism, her career was tragically cut short. Guy-Blaché, who died at the age of ninety-four in 1968, made her last feature in 1919 and was never able to make another film. With the exceptional "Be Natural", Ms Green tries to rectify this omission with her detailed documentary which showcases the extraordinary talent and inventive spirit of one of the most important female artists in cinema.
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