Don't be artificial

A few months back, TCM ran a night of movies directed by pioneering filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché. The night included a new-to-TCM documentary, Be Natural: The Alice Guy-Blaché Story. Obviously not having seen it before, and being interested in such stories about old moviemaking, I DVRed it and recently sat down to watch it.

Alice Guy (1873-1968) was a daughter in a middle-class French family who, in the early 1890s, got a job with a company making cameras and camera supplies run in part by Louis Gaumont. When the Lumières had their exhibition of moving pictures in 1895, Guy was in attendance with Gaumont, and thought she could do better by putting narrative stories on film. Gaumont allowed her to do this, since part of the plan was to use these films as an advertisement for the equipment the Gaumont company was making. (Humorously, the one catch was that Guy could only do it as long as it didn't interfere with her day job!)

Her first narrative film proved to be a success, and it led to basically being head of production for the Gaumont studio, where she directed hundreds of short films until 1906, when she was sent abroad and met Herbert Blaché, whom she would marry. The two of them were assigned to the US, which eventually led Alice to found the Solax studio in Fort Lee, NJ, since filmmaking had mostly not yet moved to Hollywood. (I mentioned regarding the Pioneer Cinematogrphers documentary TCM ran last November that some filmmakers had decamped to Hollywood to escape Edison's patent attorneys.) Solax and Guy's marriage both eventually failed, and in 1922 Guy headed back to France, never to make another movie.

But the story doesn't end there. For quite a few reasons, Guy fell into obscurity. Her films didn't have one of the big moneyed studios behind them, and were tough to find; she went back to France; other filmmakers promoted themselves better; and so on. At some point well before this documentary was conceived, she began to get a bit of her due, as I had certainly heard of her by the time TCM ran her Algie the Miner as part of the Gay Images on Film series back in, I think, 2007. Falling Leaves might have aired even earlier; I can't remember. But there are always new things to learn in researching such early days in the film industry.

Director Pamela Green proceeded to try to find that information to complete the story of Alice Guy-Blaché, and that's the other half of the documentary. It was tough to find relatives, since even Guy's grandchildren would be elderly now if even still alive. But Green found some, as well as descendants of some of the people who had worked with Guy and had archival information available to help tell the story. (One thing I found interesting as a fan of game shows that are often languishing on old media, but may not appeal to everybody, is the story of how an interview with Guy's daughter is on an old video format that's difficult to restore.) There are also some interviews, a few on film and one audio-only interview, with Guy herself near the end of her life.

Be Natural is an excellent and engaging documentary that should be of interest to anybody who has an interest in the dawn of moviemaking. If there's one quibble I have, it's that the latter stages of the movie go too far in my opinion in arguing that Guy fell into obscurity because she was a woman. Guy was a pioneering filmmaker not because she was a woman, but because everybody making movies at that time was a pioneer. Alicia Malone and her guest who did the intro to the documentary mentioned that D.W. Griffith did a lot of self-promotion which might have something to do with why he's got such an outsized place in movie history (the other part, I'd argue, has to do with Griffith donating copies of his movies to the Museum of Modern Art which is why more of his silents survive than most people's). But there are lots of other male moviemakers who wound up in obscurity too. I also can't help but wonder whether people would be taking as much interest in Guy if it were a male Alex Guy and they couldn't play the "woman filmmaker" angle. But that's really only a minor quibble.

Be Natural is available on DVD at Amazon, although the TCM Shop only has it on backorder. You can also watch it streaming via Prime Video.