A new doc­u­men­tary is reclaim­ing the lega­cy of Alice Guy-Blaché

Alice Guy-Blaché is the most impor­tant film­mak­er you’ve (prob­a­bly) nev­er heard of. As per the title of Pamela B Green’s new doc­u­men­tary, Be Nat­ur­al: The Untold Sto­ry of Alice Guy-Blaché, this incred­i­ble woman’s pio­neer­ing endeav­ours have been large­ly ignored for more than a century.

After spend­ing 15 years work­ing in open­ing cred­its and motion graph­ics design, Green was stunned upon dis­cov­er­ing Guy-Blaché for her­self. ​“I just want­ed every­body to know about her,” she tells LWLies.

Be Nat­ur­al, which opens in the UK and Ire­land on 17 Jan­u­ary, is nar­rat­ed by Jodie Fos­ter, who also served as exec­u­tive pro­duc­er along­side Robert Red­ford (“the first per­son to stand behind Alice”) and Hugh Hefn­er, to name but a few.

In 1894, 21-year-old Guy-Blaché became sec­re­tary to Léon Gau­mont, the head of a well-known cam­era man­u­fac­tur­ing and pho­tog­ra­phy sup­ply com­pa­ny in Paris. She quick­ly became a key fig­ure and one of Gaumont’s most trust­ed employees.

The fol­low­ing year, she and Gau­mont attend­ed the very first film pro­jec­tion by the Lumière broth­ers. It was then that Guy-Blaché realised she could incor­po­rate nar­ra­tive ele­ments into film, and so she asked Gau­mont for per­mis­sion to use the stu­dio. In 1896 she direct­ed what is now con­sid­ered the first nar­ra­tive film, La Fée aux Choux (The Cab­bage Fairy).

Not only was Guy-Blaché the first female film­mak­er in his­to­ry, she was one of the first direc­tors to com­bine mov­ing image and sto­ry­telling. She went on to become the head of a major stu­dio in the pre-Hol­ly­wood era, mak­ing movies about ground­break­ing top­ics such as child abuse, immi­gra­tion and female empow­er­ment. So how come so few peo­ple know about her?

Be Nat­ur­al makes a pow­er­ful point about intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty. Guy-Blaché’s vital con­tri­bu­tion to the evo­lu­tion of ear­ly cin­e­ma has been over­looked or down­grad­ed in his­to­ry due to a lack of doc­u­men­ta­tion. Phys­i­cal copies of her films were lost, with some of her works erro­neous­ly attrib­uted to oth­er direc­tors. Need­less to say, they were all men.

Once her stu­dio days were behind her, Guy-Blaché wor­ried that she wouldn’t be able to be reunit­ed with her films. She was right to be con­cerned: today only a small por­tion of the well over 1,000 films she direct­ed, wrote or pro­duced are avail­able in archives spread all over the world.

A core part of Green’s research for the film was mak­ing sure that Guy-Blaché’s voice would come through. How­ev­er, it was cru­cial to also find archival mate­r­i­al to sup­port what she wrote in her auto­bi­og­ra­phy, pub­lished posthu­mous­ly in 1976. ​“There must be 70 per cent of new mate­r­i­al that cor­rects his­to­ry as a whole,” explains Green, ​“but also real­ly puts Alice where she belongs. It’s not just being one of the pio­neers of cin­e­ma, it’s hav­ing a two-decade career.”

Green tracked down Guy-Blaché’s descen­dants in France and the US, where she relo­cat­ed with her hus­band. The pair co-found­ed The Solax Com­pa­ny, with facil­i­ties in Flush­ing, New York and Fort Lee, New Jer­sey. It was here that Guy-Blaché, as artis­tic direc­tor of the stu­dio and the mas­ter­mind behind many of its pro­duc­tions, placed a sign for her actors to read: ​“Be Natural”.

Thanks to Green’s doc­u­men­tary, Guy-Blaché’s sto­ry is now being rewrit­ten and even taught in film schools. ​“And who knows,” says Green, ​“maybe peo­ple will dress up like her for Halloween.”

“This is a les­son that we need to speak up and keep pro­mot­ing,” she adds, ​“inves­ti­gat­ing and try­ing to fill the holes of his­to­ry with all these amaz­ing faces and their accom­plish­ments. Because then, when you look at the can­vas of his­to­ry, it’ll be whole and it won’t be such a sur­prise that there are all these women, it should be a given.”

Mov­ing for­ward, Green says she would love to see her film land on a stream­ing plat­form and per­haps bring a drama­tised ver­sion of Guy-Blaché’s life to the big screen. ​“I’m nev­er gonna com­plete­ly break up with Alice,” she says. ​“I know she’s gonna be in my life.”

Be Nat­ur­al: The Untold Sto­ry of Alice Guy-Blaché screens through­out Jan­u­ary in the UK. Find out where the film is on near you at benat​u​ralthe​movie​.com