Alice Guy-Blaché was shamefully forced and written out of cinema history. Pamela B Green’s Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché aims to reclaim Guy-Blaché’s story for women, filmmakers and people to admire.
Guy-Blaché is a founding-mother of film, yet hardly anyone knows she ever existed. At the very beginning of this film, an impressive ensemble of actors, directors and others are asked if they know of Aluce Guy-Blaché. The vast majority have never heard of her. From here the question emerges – why?
The way history has treated Guy-Blaché’s is not unique. She joins a large group of so many other female artists of the past. But in this case, Alice Guy-Blaché was truly one of a kind. What she achieved is quite extraordinary and impacted the course of cinema and movies today. Falling into the industry due to chance, Alice became a pioneer for an emerging and completely unfamiliar medium that would go on to become the colossal business of movies and cinema. Be Natural is a fascinating look at her incredible life and work and examines how and why she is not more well known today.
The film does an outstanding job of tackling the daunting job or puzzling together Guy-Blaché’s life and career from the little artefacts of it. Understanding this woman, or even uncovering basic information about her, is no easy feat and I really appreciate that this knowledge now exists and the lengths the director went to slowly uncover the experience of Guy-Blaché. The investigative style of the documentary coupled with infographic style animation, although messy and a little bit hard to follow at times, brings the past to life and ties the threads of her story together. Jodie Foster does a brilliant and engaging job providing the voice-over. The information that is discovered during research is not simply retold, but rather the audience is taken on a journey as letters, film, interviews, descendants and more are painstakingly tracked down and the truth is investigated.
One of the most important paths to a positive and equal future is through rewriting history to be equal. This is an important film. Anyone who is interested in cinema should watch it, and learn about the wonder that is Alice Guy-Blaché.
Amelia 15