BY GIACOMO SELLONI
You may be aware of the fact that Christopher Columbus was not the
first European to reach the Americas. Do you also know that he was not Italian?
He couldn't read, write or even speak the language. He was either a
"Converso" - a Jew who converted to Christianity to avoid Ferdinand
and Isabella's Inquisition, or hid his Judaism. He spoke Spanish among other
languages including Greek, Latin and, most telling, Ladino - the Spanish
equivalent of Yiddish. Letters to his son were written in this language, and
the pages contained coded Jewish references. He also knew the world was
spherical (most sailors, by his time, were aware of this), his first voyage had
calm seas, not dangerous ones and the crew weren't mutineers. [See: Lies My Teacher Told Me - James
W. Loewen, The New Press 2nd Edition ©2007 and https://www.aish.com/jw/s/Christopher-Columbus-Secret-Jew.html]
You may be asking "what does this have to do with a review of a
film documentary?" The reason is
most historians are lazy and habitual plagiarists. When adding something new to
the historical record they often reprint the same falsehoods that were disseminated
generations earlier. Not unlike many superstitions, tall tales, and mistaken
attributions. Cary Grant never said: "Judy, Judy, Judy..."
And thus were the
accomplishments of Alice Guy-Blaché, arguably the first storytelling film director of
all time, were glossed over, ignored or attributed to someone else; to all men,
by the way. Her story is told in the documentary “Be
Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché”, directed by Pamela B. Green and
narrated by Jodie Foster. The film is now available on DVD from Kino Lorber.
Yes,
Edison and the Lumière Brothers made the first moving
pictures but what did they give us?
Edison:
The Sneeze - a four second film starring assistant Fred Ott. The Kiss - an 18-second
long reenactment of the kiss between May Irwin and John Rice from the
final scene of the stage musical The Widow Jones.
The
Brothers Lumière: - Their first films were of such exciting subjects as: "The
exit from the Lumière factory in Lyon," "The disembarkment of the
Congress of Photographers in Lyon," and the riveting "Jumping onto
the Blanket." Along with seven other films, all lasting between 38 and 49
seconds (approximately what a filmstrip of 17 meters long would run hand
cranked through a projector) they were screened before a paying public in
December of 1895 in Paris. Were these pioneers’ first efforts "Films" as we know them? Not to
this reviewer. Moving pictures are not FILMS. They can be called films only by
the fact that film was the medium they were created and distributed upon.
Nine months earlier, on March 22,
1895, The Lumières demonstrated their new invention,
the Cinématographe, beating Edison to the market with the first reliable method
to project motion pictures, in front of a small audience of
friends and colleagues.
Among those in attendance were Léon Gaumont, then
director of the company the Comptoir Géneral de la Photographie and his 22 year-old
secretary Alice Ida Antoinette
Guy (later Guy-Blaché). "Something better can be done than
documenting daily life. Why not tell stories through film?" she thought at
the time.
With
the approval of her boss, in 1896 she writes, directs and produces what is
generally thought to be the first narrative film ever made – “La Feé Aux Choux" or "The Fairy of the Cabbages"
that brought to life the story parents told their younger children about where
babies come from. The success of this film led to her becoming the lead
director and Head of Production for Gaumont Studios. She was one of the first to use many film
techniques such as close ups, hand-tinted color, stop action, reverse cranking
of the camera and synchronized sound. Her success as a filmmaker helped add to
Gaumont's success which enabled them to build the biggest studio stage in the
world.
Alice Guy produces and directs the first film shot in the new studio. “La
Esméralda”, based on Victor Hugo's “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame”. While
hiring new directors and set designers for the company she continues to write
and direct her own takes on fashion, children, parenthood, even child abuse.
She wrote roles for children when no one else was doing so.
She made comedies of seduction, chase films, utilizing methods she had
learned at Gaumont from her mentor, Frédéric
Dillaye.
Writer/Director
Peter Farrelly on “The Gamekeeper's Son” - "I was tense watching it,
afraid for the kid. The father died, it was heartbreaking, and that she could
tell that kind of story in four of five minutes and get you at the edge of your
seats was incredible."
Alan
Williams, film historian/author - "She was the first great comic director.
Most of her comedies have just absolute perfect comic timing. The timing on “The
Drunken Mattress” is really astonishing." "Whoever that was who kept
picking up that mattress should get an Academy Award. I've never seen anybody
fall down so much." - Peter Bogdanovich.
Many
of her comedies were "raunchy films," especially for the times. See “The Sticky Woman” for example. Her 1906 “The
Consequences of Feminism” is
described by Bogdanovich: "I think is very witty. It's a satirical comment
on male fear of feminism." Julie
Taymor: "Still to this day I haven't seen anything like that, where she
has women in women's clothes and men in men's clothes, these men are acting
like women and the women are acting as men. It's revolutionary." She was making great comedies more than a
decade before anyone heard of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd or the Keystone Cops.
In his memoirs, Sergei Eisenstein recalls that he saw this film at
eight years old. "The women rebelled. They started frequenting cafes. talk
politics, smoke cigars, while their husbands sat at home doing the
washing." Eisenstein named it his main influential film which can be seen
in his 1928 film, “October”.
Guy uses the Tissot Bible as reference material for her largest
production to date, “The Passion”. She creates 25 episodes with about 300
extras to tell the story of the life of Christ. The series contained some very
early special effects. In one case Jesus rising out of the cave.
Mark Stetson, visual effects supervisor of “Superman Returns”: "We
did a trick on “Superman Returns” that reminded me of the Jesus trick. We
dropped the camera like this, following her (Lois Lane). We still do things
that way. Nowadays we can do it with tools that make the change more
seamless."
In 1906 Alice Guy meets British born Herbert Blaché Bolton, a Gaumont employee studying camera
technology. He replaces Guy's ailing cameraman on “Mireill”e. A romance begins.
In 1907 they wed and come to the U.S. They
settle in Flushing, NY. She is nine years older than her husband.
Herbert's job for Gaumont, in Cleveland, fails but he is put in charge
of the new Gaumont studio in Flushing. Eventually, Alice rents part of it and
resumes her filmmaking career. She founds the Solax Studio and is its
president. She begins to make comedies and westerns. She is very successful and
the studio not only has a number of directors who were making three features a
week, but also a stable of actors known as the Solax Players. Above the stage
in the studio was her sign for her actors: BE NATURAL. Where the film gets its title from.
In 1911 they bought land in Fort Lee, New Jersey and began construction
on a new studio. During that time, she was pregnant with their second child and
she continued to make films back in Flushing, New York with divisive subjects
such as anti-Semitism, immigration and labor conflicts.
In 1912 the New York Dramatic Mirror reports: "She stands as the
dominant figure in a motion picture factory and studio which she organized and
built. She draws an income from $50,000 to $60,000 annually." The article
concludes with: "A biography of Madame Blaché will some day be written for every one to read
the details of her simple, fortunate life." Not a very accurate prediction.
The
western and military films she made were different that films male directors
made. Women were cast in leading and empowering roles, not solely as shrinking
violets. She also wrote and directed the first film with an all black cast; “A
Fool and His Money” in 1912.
“Be
Natural” is interspersed with interviews with Guy-Blaché from 1957 and 1964 as
well as some of her descendants in the U. S. It's through these efforts that so much is uncovered including finding
her French Legion of Honor medal she received in 1953. She passed away in
Wayne, NJ and was buried in Mahwah, NJ in 1968. A retrospective of her work was
shown at MoMA in 1985 curated by Cecille Starr and many of her films, once
thought lost forever, have been restored. Some can be found on YouTube.
“Be Natural - The Untold Story of
Alice Guy-Blaché” is a perfect film for March, the month we celebrate
Women's History. The story of the world's first female film director is an
important one. Not only the sake of cinema histgory but for society's sake. How
Alice Guy was treated by the Establishment after she retired from filmmaking
and by her insecure husband (the story of the breakup of her marriage is also
dealt with here) are a lesson for many time periods. In total, during her two-
decade career in two countries her output alone (an estimated one thousand plus
films she either produced, wrote or directed) surpassed Edison's studio, the Lumières and Georges Mèliés achievements. This is a documentary that deserves to be seen.
Alfred
Hitchcock said, in the biography “It's Only a Movie”: "I was
thrilled by the films of D. W. Griffith and the early French director Alice
Guy."
I
was thrilled and enlightened by this documentary.
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