Be Natural : L'Histoire cachée d'Alice Guy-Blaché

There is so much talk of the Hollywood Boys' Club and the lack of diversity right now. Anyone who cares should see this movie, about an early pioneer in the movies. A great untold story.

I HAD heard of Guy-Blache, but then I have been a silent film geek for almost 50 years now. Have been catching what I can on-line of her work - so far, 1916 The Ocean Waif is the best, Doris Kenyon was a far more natural actress then Pickford or the Gish sisters based on that film.

I think that Simon could have skipped including so many phone interviews with distance relatives of Guy-Blache, (many of which could have used subtitles, I found them hard to understand) and included some longer clips of her actual films instead. It is obvious that a lot of work went into digging up information on Guy-Blache, and I appreciate it, but would rather have seen more of her work than her family life. Still, I gave it 9 out of 10 stars since the subject matter is so important to film history...and I LOVE the opening postcard collages that take the viewer back in time and across the ocean!

I went to see this film following a strong review in Melbourne (Australia). However, I thought that it was very poorly assembled as a film. It seemed that the film's makers were keen to include absolutely everything they could find, and the choice of order for all these clips was baffling as well as non-stop. I will be the first in the queue to see another film made to cover the astonishing life of Alice Guy-Blache - she deserves better than this attempt.

In "Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché," Jodi Foster narrates Pamela B. Green's engaging, fascinating, informative, 103-minute documentary that focuses on the remarkable, obscure career of pioneering, Paris-born, first woman filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968) who wrote, directed, and/or produced more than 1,000 films many with unconventional subject matter through her film production company Solax and tells her story through candid interview snippets with the groundbreaking filmmaker in 1964, excerpts from her letters, and black-and-white film clips and photographs and includes insightful interviews with filmmakers (such as Ava DuVernay, Catherine Hardwicke, Diablo Cody, Patricia Riggen, Tacita Dean, Julie Taymor, John Chu, Ann Fletcher, Liz Goldwyn, Cari Beauchamp, Cecile Starr, Anne Fontaine, Mark Romanek, Peter Farrelly, Floria Sigismondi, Kevin Macdonald, Maxine Haleff, Patty Jenkins, Michel Hazanavicius, Marjane Satpari, and Gary Mairs), actors (such as Sir Ben Kingsley, Julie Delpy, Evan Rachel Wood, Geena Davis, Lake Bell, Andy Samberg, Janeane Garofolo, and Kathleen Turner), producers Marc Abraham and Stephanie Dillain, Co-President of Roadside Attractions Howard Cohen, screenwriter Gale Ann Hurd, film critic Peter Bogdanovich, historians (such as Mark Wanamaker, Anthony Slide, Kevin Brownlow, Glenn Myrent, Alison McMahon, Naum 'Kleiman, and Alan Williams), Guy-Blaché memoirs co-editor Claire Clouzet, film preservationist Serge Bromberg, professors (such as Drake Stutesman, Jane Goenes, Henry Jenkins, Gigi Pritzker, Richard Koszaeski, and Vanessa Schwartz), journalist Jean-Michel Frodon, film editor Walter Murch, film archivist Dino Everett, facial recognition analyst Steve Wilkins, costume designer Deborah Nadvolman Landis, lecturer Roland-Francois Lick, cinematographers (such as Pierre-William Glenn, Claire Wickell, and John Bailey), film collector Murray Glass, visual effects supervisor Mark Stetson, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President John Bailey, and granddaughter Tatiana Page-Relo.

The director spent a decade of her life gathering evidence that Alice Guy-Blache was one of the founders of cinema, on the same level as the Lumiere Brothers, Georges Melies and Thomas Edison, and the case she makes is completely convincing. This film should be seen by everyone interested in movie history.