Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (Wildwood Enterprises, Artemis Rising Foundation, Foothill Productions, Be Natural Production, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Philadelphia Turner Classic Movies showed a major documentary on the pioneering French filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché called Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché. The 2018 film was inspired by a book by Alison McMahan called Alice Guy-Blaché, Lpsr Visionary of the Cinema. The film is a real treat for people like me who feel frustrated and angered by what I call “frist-itis,” the tendency of biographers in all media to assume that the person they’re writing about was the first to do something even though it’s often quite easy to trace someone who did it before. In Alice Guy-Blaché’s case (and in the case of most of the women filmmakers who had important roles in the industry from the 1890’s to the early 1920’s and have been quite consciously written out of the standard film histories) it goes beyond “first-itis” to a deliberate whitewashing of the history of early film to eliminate the substantial contributions of women in the early days. The usual “print the legend” version of movie history is that Thomas A. Edison invented them, his right-hand man Edwini S. Porter pioneered the job of movie director and was the first person to think of film as a medium for storytelling, D. W. Griffitn who invented the basic grammar of film – including close-ups, moving-camera shots, suspense editing and intercutting – Thomas H. Ince who was the first studio head, and Mack Sennett who pioneered comedy, especially slapstick.in films. This documentary makes a good case that the movies were actually invented in France, and Alice Guy-Blaché arguably was the true pioneer in all the disciplines of filmmaking: the first screenwriter, the first director, the first studio head and the first to make genuinely funny films.

Alice Guy was the fifth child of a French couple who had just moved back to Paris from a long stint in Chile, and later her parents moved back there so she grew up speaking both Spanish and French. Later the family returned to France, and when her father died Alice was forced to find work to support herself and her mother. She got a job as secretary to Léon Gaumont, inventor of a movie camera that was sufficiently different from Edison’s version that it was legal to use without paying Edison royalties, and she began making films using the Gaumont camera. Gaumont was a friend of Louis and Auguste Lumiére, who organized the first public exhibition of moving pictures in Paris in November 1896 but had given a private screening earlier that year in March at which Léon Gaumont and Alice Guy were present. It was Alice Guy who apparently first thought that movies didn’t have to be just documentary scenes of ordinary life – trains approaching the camera, surf at the beach, people going to or coming home from work, and the like – but could actually tell a story. In 1896 she wrote and directed The Cabbage Fairy, a fantasy that anticipated another French pioneer, Georges Méliès, in its whimsical nature (the titular cabbage fairy grows cabbages in a patch and they turn into babies, whom she sends to expectant parents) and early use of special effects. The Cabbage Fairy was a smash hit, and Léon Gaumont put Alice Guy in charge of producing movies for his company (which still exists; it’s the oldest movie studio in continuous operation anywhere in the world, having started in 1892, a year before the second oldest, Pathé).

In 1907 she started a relationship with another Gaumont employee, Herbert Blaché, and they became engaged – much to the displeasure of Léon Gaumont, who had planned to send Blaché to Germany to open a branch of Gaumont there. Alice went with him despite not knowing German, and the two eventually married. Gaumont ultimately sent them to the U.S. to organize an American branch of his company, but in 1910 they decided to strike out on their own and formed an independent studio called Solax,whose logo was a rising sun. During her French years Alice Guy pioneered color films (the colors were hand-painted on the film using stencils, essentially an early form of colorization) and also sound films through the Chronophone, a Gaumont invention by which the sound was pre-recorded on a phonograph disc and then the film was shot with the actors miming to the pre-recording, much the way musicals would be made after the success of The Broadway Melody in 1929. Several surviving Chronophones were included in this documentary – though, as Charles noted, it’s not clear whether these were originals or modern reconstructions – and the subjects were established French vaudeville and cabaret singers performing and recording their public acts. Edison experimented with sound films at around the same time, but his system differed in that he tried to record the picture and sound simultaneously, which given that he was still using acoustic recording, the actors had to turn to the giant recording horn to have any chance of being heard.

Solax set up shop in New Jersey, which was actually the center of U.S. film production in the 1910’s, and both companies that were part of the “Motion Picture Patents Trust” set up by Thomas Edicon and film manufacturer George Eastman (founder of Kodak) to control the industry, and independent studios like the companies that later became Paramount, Universal and MGM located there. Alice Guy-Blaché and her husband continued to run Solax until the early 1920’s, when a combination of a studio fire, financial problems and the breakdown of the Blaché/Guy marriage (Blaché was an inveterate womanizer and among his paramours were Solax’s biggest star and Mrs. Phillips Smalley, who using her maiden name, Lois Weber, became the second major woman film director) led to the studio’s collapse in 1922. Alice Guy-Blaché returned to France that year and vainly tried to get work in the industry she’d helped create. In 1927 she went back to the U.S. to try to recover prints of her films, but she couldn’t find any; at that time movies were considered totally disposable, and it wasn’t until 1939 that the New YOrk Museum of Modern Art set up a film curation department and put Iris Barry (another woman pioneer!) in charge of it. For the rest of her life she lived in retirement, writing a book of memoirs that was not published until after her death in 1968. For much of that time she was supported by her daughter Simone (much the way Alice herself had supported her widowed mother decades earlier), who got a job with the U.S. State Department.

The documentary featured interviews with Alice Guy-Blaché herself and her daughter Simone; it was narrated by Jodie Foster and featured interviews with modern-day women filmmakers – among them Catherine Hardwicke, Gale Ann Hurd, Julie Taympr and Ava DuVernay – understandably upset that Alice Guy=Blaché’s name had literally been written out of film history. In the 1930’s Léon Gaumont wrote an official history of his company and left Alice totally out of it, and years later a film documentary on Fort Lee, New Jersey when it was the filmmaking center of the U.S. attributed the founding of Solax exclusively to Herbert Blaché and once again made no mention of his wife, even though Alise had not only personally directed a large number of Solax’s releases but had functioned as the studio head, assigning writers,directors and actors to various projects. The showing of the documentary was followed by two surviving films directed by Alice Guy-Blaché, Algae, the Miner (1912) – a one-reel comedy Western about Algie, an effeminate young man (who actually kisses another man on the lips!) who gets sent out to the wild West in hopes that this will “make a man of him” (a plot line that’s been used by innumerable comics since,from Buster Keaton to Don Knotts) and The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ, a 1906 Gaumont production based on the so-called “Tissot Bible.”

This was an illustrated version of the New Testament (or at least the four canonical Gospels) with illustrations by an artist named James Tissot who went to the historical locations in Palestine to see what they looked like first-hand, and Alice Guy-Blaché essentially set 25 of Tissot’s plates and filmed them. The result is a rather static movie – if Guy-Blaché pioneered close-ups and suspense editing in other films,she didn’t do it here; the film is a series of tableaux and you’d be hard pressed to keep track of the story if you didn’t already know it. But it was a visually impressive production with elaborate sets and literally 300 extras filling out Guy-Blaché’s visual tableaux. Unfortunately, surviving prints don’t carry the name of Alice Guy-Blaché as director and instead credit the film’s assistant director, a man named Victorin Jassot who directed the crowd scenes, as the director: yet another insult to Guy-Blaché’s personal and professional reputation.