Rent Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018)

About the first female filmmaker - Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché review by MA

This film simply has to be seen.  You haven’t heard of her?  Oh dear...  If you love film, this will open your eyes. I believe she has been deliberately kept out of film history, almost certainly because she’s a woman.  Don’t miss this film under any circumstances.

Potentially interesting documentary, but spoiled by very fast edits - Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché review by PC

"Be Natural" was a potentially interesting, and important, documentary about Alice Guy-Blaché, but was spoiled by unnecessary very fast edits throughout most of the film, which quickly became pretty exhausting and tedious. It's as though the director had tried to compress a three hour film into 90 minutes, without leaving anything out.

It's a great shame, and also ironic: the documentary was a significant opportunity to highlight the importance of Guy-Blaché's pioneering work and her impact on the film industry, after what appeared to be decades-long attempts by others to erase her contributions and achievements from history, and yet the modern-day director of the documentary messed it up.

If you can stand the roller-coaster ride of visuals and very fast editing for an hour-and-a-half, then you might be able to snatch a very interesting history of one of cinema's most important creative pioneers.

More about researching a film, than about Alice Guy. - Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché review by RCO

Firstly the sound balance on this DVD was appalling with the music backing track, whilst not intrusive, muffling the voice-over for much of the time.

Secondly there seems to be very little in the way of examples of Alice's actual films - possibly because so few have been found, although the film implies that many are available in archives (although possibly still on degraded and dangerous nitrate film-stock). Actually if you took all of the clips together and threw away much of the padding about researching the film it might be quite interesting.

A lot of the film seems to be taken up with graphics of animated dotted lines on a map illustrating the links between Paris and New jersey and Hollywood and all the places in between where Pamela Green went to talk to children and grandchildren of Alice. A lot more is taken up with a mosaic of clips of people, presumably all 'film people', saying they've never heard of her, and then how wonderful she was for unspecified reasons.

The best bits are when we see clips of her films and how the ideas have been recreated in later films - including the famous pram scene in Battleship Potemkin; it seems a young Eisenstien saw an Alice Guy film and it made a big impression on him.

All in all this could have been a really good 30 minute documentary about Alice Guy including a more chronological use of the available clips and without all the stuff about Pamela Green's research methods (she uses the internet, gasp!!!)