Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché

French-born filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché is duly credited as cinema's first woman director, but that distinction hardly captures her proper place in film history. One of the first professional filmmakers of any gender (her first credit dates back to 1896), Guy-Blaché made the earliest known film to present a narrative story, was the first head of production for France's Gaumont Studio, and founded and ran an independent studio in Fort Lee, NJ, before the birth of Hollywood. She directed hundreds of films in a career that lasted nearly 30 years, experimented with synchronized sound some decades before the talkies, and was a cinema innovator who incorporated editing, close-ups, and complex compositions before they became part of the lexicon of film language. So why isn't she as well-known as her male contemporaries? Narrated by Jodie Foster, filmmaker Pamela B. Green's documentary—produced in collaboration with film historian Joan Simon and Guy-Blaché biographer Alison McMahan—explores the life, career, and legacy of Guy-Blaché with a wealth of film clips and archival interviews with the filmmaker herself from the 1950s and ‘60s. But it also explores how and why the director was left out of books on film history (as male colleagues and assistants took credit for her work), illustrates the process of film research necessary to correct the historical record, and argues why it is important. This documentary tackles so much that it sometimes fails to give Guy-Blaché's artistic achievements their full due—she was an artist and one of the first cinema masters—and it does suffer a bit from pointless celebrity soundbite overload (Evan Rachel Wood? Peter Billingsley?). But this is a necessary first step and Green's crisp direction makes this investigative tribute both entertaining and involving. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (S. Axmaker)