BE NATURAL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ (2018) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Pamela B. Green
Jodie Foster narrates a revealing documentary about a cinema pioneer, a woman whose work has influenced virtually every filmmaker since 1900, but whose name remains practically unknown. Alice Guy was a 22-year-old secretary working for the French camera manufacturer Gaumont in 1895, when the Lumière Brothers first demonstrated their Cinematographe machine. She was there at the demonstration. Talk about getting in on the ground floor. Within a year, she was making her own films and running Gaumont's movie production facility. Years before D.W. Griffith stepped behind a camera, Guy was shooting closeups, experimenting with sound and special effects, and telling stories with film. Moving to the U.S., she directed literally hundreds of pictures for her own company, but after it folded, she had trouble finding work. By the early 1920s, her career in film was over. She lived to be 94, long enough to be rediscovered, despite the systematic efforts of Gaumont's corporate historians to erase her name. This movie should introduce her to a few more students of film, and you can't help thinking there's another great movie waiting to be made, one that will maybe do for Alice Guy what Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" did for Georges Méliès.
