New York Times: ‘Be Natural’ Review: Rescuing Alice Guy Blaché, a Film Pioneer, From Oblivion

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché

Directed by Pamela B. Green

Documentary 1h 43m

By A.O. Scott

At the beginning of Pamela B. Green’s lively and informative new documentary, a bevy of movie people — directors, actors, scholars and others — are asked if they know anything about Alice Guy Blaché, who is the subject of the film. A few of them do (Ava DuVernay, for one), but most admit that they have no clue. Viewers who are similarly ignorant shouldn’t feel bad, and in the best pedagogical spirit Green turns blank looks and sheepishly shrugged shoulders into a teaching moment. “Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché” seeks both to help rescue Guy Blaché from oblivion and to explain how she got there in the first place.

Alice Guy was born into a bourgeois French family in 1873. An interview conducted more than 90 years later reveals a woman very much of her era and class, with crisp diction, faultless grammar and a mildly ironical way of talking about even painful and contentious matters. Trained in stenography, Alice was hired, at 22, as an assistant to Léon Gaumont, who would soon become one of the founders of the French film industry.

Guy (who married the British cameraman Herbert Blaché in 1907) merits that description as much as her boss. Often referred to as a pioneer — one of a handful of important women filmmakers active in cinema’s earliest days — she was more than that. Present at an early, private Paris showing of one of Louis and Auguste Lumière’s first shorts, Guy was among the first to explore the storytelling potential of the new medium. At the Gaumont studio, where she worked until 1906, she directed hundreds of fantasies, comedies, melodramas and historical films. After moving to the United States, she set up her own company, Solax Studios, continuing her prolific output in the burgeoning proto-Hollywood of Fort Lee, N.J.

She was, in sum, a studio chief as well as a director and producer — a key figure in the emergence of two major national cinemas. The recovery of this reputation is central to Green’s project, and she builds on the work of historians and archivists, including Guy Blaché’s biographer, Alison McMahan. “Be Natural” is its own making-of documentary, following Green’s gumshoe efforts to track down letters and ledgers, artifacts and descendants. She enlists a specialist in facial recognition to determine whether a woman in an ancient moving picture is indeed Guy Blaché. She zigzags across Los Angeles in search of a lab that will digitize antique videotapes. She details her own cross-country and trans-Atlantic peregrinations as well as those undertaken by her heroine more than a century earlier.

The result is occasionally a little frantic — animated segments sometimes bring the past to life and sometimes get in the way — and often tremendously moving. The interviews with Guy Blaché and with her daughter, Simone, bring a tender, complicated dimension of personality, and make it feel as if the dawn of movies is not so far away after all. The present-day celebrities, who seem to become instant experts after their initial confessions of cluelessness, add little beyond their own boldface names. (An exception is Jodie Foster, who provides voice-over narration and served as an executive producer.) The preservationists and film historians are the truly fascinating characters, and it would be good to learn even more about the work of rescue and recovery they do.

“Be Natural” is inspiring because it is also appalling. The near-forgetting of Guy Blaché wasn’t just an accident of film history, though the fact that most of her work belongs to the years before World War I made it especially vulnerable to loss. Green notes that she is less well-known than contemporaries like Lois Weber and Dorothy Arzner, but those women were also written out of film history or pushed to its margins.

Guy Blaché found America a more welcoming working environment than France. But in both countries the record of her achievements was erased. Her early Gaumont pictures were attributed to her male assistants, and their originality and quality went unrecognized, in spite of evidence of her influence on later auteurs like Sergei Eisenstein and Alfred Hitchcock. When it was remembered at all, Solax Studios was thought of as Herbert Blaché’s company.

Green’s revision of that record is long overdue and just in time, given the present-day reckoning with Hollywood’s stubborn traditions of behind-the-scenes (and onscreen) sexism. Most intriguing are the clips the documentary gathers from Guy Blaché’s films. Many of them look less like old curiosities than lost classics, and their range — from the surreal slapstick of “The Drunken Mattress,” to the domestic melodrama of “Falling Leaves,” to the social satire of “Consequences of Feminism” — is astonishing. (Several have been issued by Kino Lorber in the indispensable “Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers” collection). By the end of “Be Natural,” you won’t only have a clear idea of who this remarkable woman was; you may well have acquired a new taste in old movies.

New York Times: Overlooked No More: Alice Guy Blaché, the World’s First Female Filmmaker

Even before women had the right to vote, Blaché, in her actions and in her films, expressed female drives, desires and self-determination.

Published Sept. 6, 2019

Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

By Manohla Dargis

In 1911, The Moving Picture News wrote that Alice Guy Blaché, the first female filmmaker in history, was a “fine example of what a woman can do if given a square chance in life.”

Blaché had already founded a successful film company in the United States by the time the article was published, announcing a new studio she was opening in New Jersey. She soon built that studio, adding to her triumphs. Cinema was Blaché’s passion — she called it her Prince Charming — and it took her across continents and centuries in a life shaped both by soaring achievements and by some of the same struggles that women moviemakers face today.

She was aware of her singularity.

“I have produced some of the biggest productions ever released by a motion picture company,” Blaché told the entertainment weekly The New York Clipper in 1912.

She made — directed, produced or supervised (often doing triple duty) — about 1,000 films, many of them short, the standard at the time.

She would later leave the industry at a time when her life was marred by personal and professional disappointments, then spend years trying to claim her place in the very history that she had helped make.

Like other trailblazing women from cinema’s formative years, Blaché has been discovered, somehow overlooked and rediscovered anew. Only now, largely because of the feminist film scholars who are writing women back into history, does her place seem secure.

Blaché got her start in films when she was 22 and working as a secretary in Paris for Léon Gaumont, an inventor who had begun manufacturing motion-picture cameras. To demonstrate them to clients, his company made short films that Blaché thought could be better.

“I had read a good deal,” she wrote in “The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché,” which was ushered into publication posthumously in 1976 by the historian Anthony Slide. And she had done some “amateur theatricals.”

Blaché, center, in a scene from “Sage-Femme de Première Classe” (“First Class Midwife”), from 1902, about a young couple who go shopping for a baby. (Blaché played the husband.)Credit...Photograph Collections of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

She asked Gaumont if she could film a few scenes.

“It seems like a silly, girlish thing to do,” Gaumont told her, Blaché recalled many decades later in a French television interview, “but you can try if you want. On one condition: that your office work does not suffer.”

Armed with a cameraman, an actress and a painted backdrop, she made “La Fée aux Choux” (“The Cabbage Fairy”) in 1896, her first film. A pantomimed one-minute charmer, it shows a young woman who, with a smile and a bosom wreathed in flowers, plucks squalling naked babies from a cabbage patch constructed out of wood. Some historians believe that Blaché’s inaugural effort was “Sage-Femme de Première Classe” (“First Class Midwife”) her 1902 remake about a young couple who go shopping for a baby. (Blaché played the husband.)

Gaumont soon made Blaché the head of film production at his company, where she produced and supervised hundreds of films, helped create an organized studio system years before Hollywood was a company town and trained luminaries of the art like Louis Feuillade. When she moved to the United States, where she resumed her film career, her time at Gaumont was touted in profiles. In 1912, the trade journal The Movie Picture World, wrote: “She inaugurated the presentation of little plays on the screen by that company some 16 or 17 years ago.”

Alice Ida Antoinette Guy was born in Saint-Mandé, on the eastern edge of Paris, on July 1, 1873. Her parents, Marie and Émile Guy, were French but lived in Chile, where her father was a bookseller; Marie returned to France for Alice’s birth and then left the child with a grandmother. Three years later, Marie returned for Alice, and they sailed to Chile. While passing through the Strait of Magellan, near Chile’s southern tip, as she recalled in her memoir, she conjured up fairies and beasts on walls of ice — an early, whimsical prelude to her screen reveries.

Assorted tragedies in Chile followed, and the Guys eventually returned to France, but over time the family disintegrated, leaving Alice to support her mother.

Much of Alice’s early years seemed to prepare her for a life in cinema, filled as they were with adventures, deprivations and moments of fortitude. In her first secretarial position, in an all-male factory, she recalled, she boldly stood up to a sexual harasser.

“My youth, my inexperience, my sex,” Blaché wrote of her entrance into moviemaking, “all conspired against me.” But she was hardworking and tenacious, and would prove to be prolific.

In 1894, she talked Gaumont, then the second-in-command at a photography company, into hiring her. Not long after, Gaumont formed his own company and Blaché became a pioneer, making films that were colored by hand and others that used a pioneering sound system, which synced visuals with prerecorded wax cylinders. Blaché can be seen in one clip starting a phonograph while she directs both the cast and the crew. Among her Gaumont titles are “La Femme Collante,” a risqué charmer about a maid with an amusingly sticky tongue, and “Le Matelas Alcoolique” about a peripatetic mattress with a drunken man sewn into it.

In 1907, she married Herbert Blaché, another Gaumont employee, and resigned as head of film production to accompany him to the United States, where he was sent to promote Gaumont’s sync-sound film system. The undertaking was a bust. But in 1910, two years after giving birth to their daughter, Simone, Alice Blaché formed the Solax Company and began making her own movies. She was so successful that in 1912 — the year she gave birth to their son, Reginald — Blaché built her own state-of-the-art studio in Fort Lee, N.J., then a bustling film town.

She kept up a heroic pace at Solax. She would jump in her car or on a horse to scout locations, including an orphanage, an opium parlor, night court and Sing Sing prison, where she declined the invitation to witness an execution. She supervised other directors and assistants, oversaw a stock company of adult and child actors, and corralled a menagerie of animal performers, among them rats, lions, panthers and a 600-pound tiger named Princess. On one studio wall she hung a sign that read, “Be Natural.”

Her interest in realism as well as performance dovetailed with what her biographer Alison McMahan said was Blaché’s greatest achievement. Her films, McMahan said in a phone interview, “focused on the psychological perspective of the central characters.

Blaché told The Clipper in 1912: “I have always impressed upon my associate directors that success comes only to those who give the public what it wants, plus something else. That something else I would call our individuality, if you please.”

Blaché expanded her repertoire at Solax with cowboy films like “Two Little Rangers,” which features a pair of gun-toting heroines, one of them a girl with long curls who backs a villain off a cliff. Whether or not it was feminist by design, the film is feminist by default. Blaché wondered if women were ready for the right to vote, but in her actions and in her films she expressed female drives, desires and self-determination.

At Solax, she successfully made the transition to feature filmmaking, creating longer, more narratively complex titles that were well-received, though they also entailed higher production costs and longer preparations. Yet while Blaché navigated the shift to features creatively, she didn’t weather the seismic changes affecting the fast-growing movie world, including monopolistic distribution practices. By 1914, she and Herbert Blaché had joined forces with another enterprise for which they both directed.

The last chapter of Blaché’s filmmaking career was marred by setbacks and disappointments both in her new ventures with her husband and as a director for hire. She made “The Ocean Waif,” a touching romance about an abused young woman and a writer that gives (almost) equal weight to both.

Other films followed, but by the time she directed the well-regarded “Her Great Adventure,” Blaché was struggling with her health, financial difficulties, a broken marriage and continued industry upheaval. She declined to direct a “Tarzan” movie. In 1922, the Solax studio was auctioned off, and Blaché, now divorced, returned to France with her two children.

In France she tried to find film work with no luck. It’s unclear why she didn’t succeed, although by the 1920s, the movies were a big business and no longer as hospitable to women who wanted to make their own films. She sold her books, paintings and other possessions and wrote articles and children’s stories.

She and her daughter, who worked for the American Foreign Service, spent the last years of World War II in Switzerland, where Blaché began writing her memoir. She also tried to find her films, but most were unavailable and presumed lost. She nevertheless persevered, gave interviews and in time gained some recognition for her pioneering role in cinema.

Blaché wrote of her life: “It is a failure; is it a success? I don’t know.” She died on March, 24, 1968, in a nursing home in New Jersey. She was 94.

In 2012, the Fort Lee Film Commission installed a new gravestone for Blaché. The original one had noted only her name and the dates of her birth and death. The new memorial states that Alice Guy Blaché was “first woman motion picture director,” the “first woman studio head” and the “president of the Solax Company, Fort Lee, N.J.”

The memorial is also adorned with the Solax logo: an image of the sun rising on a new day.

BBC - Travel Was this the First US' Film town?

Fort Lee's days of movie stardom may have been a flash in the pan, but the New Jersey town’s role in the history of film is unmistakable.

By Laura Kiniry

22 February 2019

A famous black-and-white image from the early days of film shows actress Pearl White looking coyly to her side while three men – one standing beside a movie camera, the others closer to the ground behind the actress – are setting up a scene on a precarious cliff above a distant body of water. The now-iconic still is from White’s 1918 film serial The House of Hate, a nail-biting murder mystery that ended in suspenseful cliffhangers each week.

In fact, this is where the term ‘cliffhanger’ (as it refers to film) is believed to have been coined. Still, the setting is far from Hollywood. It’s northern New Jersey – just across the Hudson River from New York City – which for a brief but glorious time in the early 20th Century was the silent film capital of the world.

Walk around Fort Lee today and you’ll see that it’s brimming with modern development. With more than one-third of the borough’s population of Asian origin – and more than a third of that Korean – Fort Lee’s centre bustles with 24-hour eateries serving up everything from pork-bone hotpots to spicy soft tofu soup.

Towering high rises face out across the Hudson toward upper Manhattan, and traffic pours into downtown from both levels of the double-decker George Washington Bridge. Though while film buffs might easily recognise the borough’s landmark bridge from films such as Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose, Fort Lee’s role as the birthplace of the motion picture industry seemed to have been lost in the vaults for decades, and is only recently being rediscovered.

“Fort Lee’s movie history was one of those things that was always in the background growing up,” said Eric Nelsen, a historical interpreter for Palisades Interstate Park – the backdrop for White’s House of Hate photo – who grew up in New Jersey’s Bergen County (of which Fort Lee is a part). “But once you start digging into it, all the information is actually overwhelming.”

According to Tom Meyers, founder and executive director of the Fort Lee Film Commission, a non-profit dedicated to preserving and promoting the borough’s unique film history, Fort Lee housed more than a dozen working film studios during World War One – such as the Victor Film Company, Fox Film Corporation and Goldwyn Picture Corporation (the last standing of which, Champion/Universal, was bulldozed in 2013). And if you grew up in town any time since, chances are you had relatives who worked in the industry. “My grandmother got her start as a film extra and then later moved on to cutting film,” Meyers said, “and my mother and uncles worked for the studio that would later merge with Universal.”

From approximately 1909 to 1918, Fort Lee was the centre of the cinematic universe (Hollywood’s first film studio opened in 1911, but it took until the early ‘20s for the West Coast film industry to become well known). Inventor Thomas Edison had already built his Black Maria, ‘America’s first movie studio’, in nearby West Orange, New Jersey, where he kept his home and laboratory, and with the help of his assistant, William Dickson, invented the kinetoscope, precursor to the film projector.

There was local momentum for sure, but Fort Lee was also camera-ready. The greater borough’s natural and manmade landscapes made it the perfect place for picture-making. There were the Palisades’ sheer cliffs – an easy stand-in for canyon country – and below them the Hudson River, which could be made to look like a seaside harbour, coastal stretch or in some cases even an ocean. The top of the Palisades’ were a mix of wide-open plateau and tall trees that at the right angle resembled the woods of England, as was the case in the obscure 1912 adventure short, Robin Hood. Then there was the town itself, with its wood-frame houses, narrow streets and a small stretch of stone and granite businesses that served as ‘Anytown, USA’. Directors even rented horses from a nearby stable for films’ many Wild West scenes. With such a wealth of scenic variety in such proximity to a major hub like New York City, Fort Lee appeared to have had it made.

A lot of what the industry takes for granted today was all figured out in Fort Lee

“It’s strange to think that movie making is so ubiquitous today, yet it all began here in Fort Lee barely a century ago,” Nelson said. “A lot of what the industry takes for granted today – things like using multiple cameras for different angled shots, and ways to diffuse light – it was all figured out in Fort Lee.”

With the films came the actors, many of whom went on to become big Hollywood stars: names like Fatty Arbuckle, Mary Pickford and Theda Bara all got their start in Fort Lee. Others, such as the first-ever host of the Academy Awards, Douglas Fairbanks, moved to the borough for its cinema opportunities as well. The Marx Brothers began their film career here with their first-ever comedy short, the now-lost Humor Risk – and patriarch of the Barrymore acting dynasty, Maurice Barrymore, was not only a Fort Lee resident but also helped build a local volunteer fire station. To raise money, he staged a play called Man of the World at the former Buckheister’s Beer Garden on Main Street, where a car park now stands. His 18-year-old son John – Drew Barrymore’s grandfather and one of the most celebrated actors of his era – played the starring role. It was his acting debut.

But Fort Lee’s film heyday was short lived. When frigid temperatures bring the US’ Mid-Atlantic region to a standstill and winter transforms the Hudson River into a sea of slush and ice, it’s easy to see why the movie industry soon left northern New Jersey for Hollywood’s perpetually sunny skies. A coal shortage that left studios unheated during a brutally cold New Jersey winter, coupled with the influenza pandemic of 1918, caused many of Fort Lee’s movie studios to close indefinitely. Rather than reopen, they simply up and moved to year-round warm and temperate California. Many of the borough’s studios were left abandoned and eventually burned down or were torn down over the years for redevelopment, and Fort Lee’s film history became a thing of the past.

In fact, when local resident Sean Ng first moved to Fort Lee from Manhattan about five years ago, he knew nothing about its days as a cinema star. But soon he started noticing large plaques detailing the borough’s legendary past erected in several spots throughout town, especially closer to its commercial centre. “[Now that I’ve discovered the local film history], it feels rather special,” he said. “When you speak of movies, Hollywood usually comes to mind, not Fort Lee, New Jersey.” He asked some his neighbours for more information, but few of them knew much the borough’s film era.

It’s strange to think the place that pioneered the world’s movie industry remains so low-key about its background, but there’s been active motion to change this. Along with nearly a dozen plaques commemorating Fort Lee’s film history, there are also several decorative street signs honouring local stars of the silent screen, including John Barrymore Way (on the corner of Main Street and Central Road, where the original Buckheister’s once stood) and Theda Bara Way (on the corner of Main Street and Linwood Avenue, named for the femme fatale actress who became one of film’s original sex symbols). Just this autumn, ground broke on the Barrymore Film Center, a film museum and 260-seat cinema scheduled to open in February 2020, with its entrance right across the street from Fort Lee’s historical First National Bank building, used in the DW Griffith 1911 drama Her Awakening.

When you speak of movies, Hollywood usually comes to mind, not Fort Lee, New Jersey

The bank is one of the few structures that remains from the borough’s silent-film days, where apartment buildings, car parks, convenience stores and rampant reconstruction have since usurped colonial-style mansions and movie studios. But you can still take a stroll through downtown’s Monument Park, where actor-turned-director Griffith shot early films such as 1909’s The Cord of Life and Harley Knowles directed 1917’s The Volunteer. Or snap some pics outside Rambo’s, a former two-storey saloon along First Street in the borough’s residential Coytesville neighbourhood that is now government-assisted housing for veterans. In the early days of film, Rambo’s stood in for everything from a New England tavern to a Western saloon – and later earned the nickname the ‘Silicon Valley of Film’ from Meyers and his colleagues for being an incubator of early film ideas. “Crew from every film studio came here because it was the only game in town for lunch,” Meyers said. “They sat in Rambo’s outdoor picnic area and came up with innovative new ways to do things, like diffusing light by holding a tablecloth up to the sun.”

Of course, there’s also Cliffhanger Point, that natural overhang that Pearl White and her own crew made famous. “For years I never knew where that sight was,” Nelson said, “but when we finally found it, it was so obvious. You could actually line up the cracks in the rock.]

When it comes down to it, Fort Lee’s days of movie stardom may have been a flash in the pan, but the town’s role in the history of film is unmistakable. “This is the place that pioneered film studios,” Meyers said. “The studios and many of their films may be gone, but their ghosts undoubtedly remain.”

They’re simply lurking behind high-rises and 24-hour Korean eateries.