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This week’s film, Be Natural, is about Alice Guy-Blache, a French filmmaker who started in the late 19th century but is largely unknown today. Rebecca Bertrand is the executive director of newportFILM and talked with The Public’s Radio production director James Baumgartner. newportFILM will host a Q&A with Be Natural‘s director, Pamela Green and Leslie Jones from the Preservation Society of Newport County at 8PM on newportFILM’s Facebook page.
James Baumgartner: Rebecca, can you tell me: who was Alice Guy-Blache?
Rebecca Bertrand: Alice was the first female film director. She made her first film in 1896, which is pretty incredible. Unfortunately, she’s been largely forgotten by the film industry and by history narratives altogether, but her career was quite prolific she directed and produced over 1000 short films and 20 feature length films, but was forgotten by narratives and spent most of her life looking for her films trying to get them back. So this film uncovers where the negatives have gone and travels through different film archives to try to piece them back together and and get some recognition for this incredible woman.
James Baumgartner: People from the early days of filmmaking – the general public might know about them – like the Lumiere brothers or Thomas Edison had a lot of influence. And he took a lot of influence as well, but Alice was even unknown to many people who studied film history, right?
Rebecca Bertrand: Yes, I unfortunately, and it’s pretty interesting because this film goes through her whole history and why she’s been forgotten. And unfortunately, it’s like so many historical narratives we hear about now that the history of film was written by a certain group of people, and they didn’t want the credit taken from them. So the gentleman they worked fo when she worked in France, Gaumont was one of the leading early filmmakers, but when they wrote his history, he completely wrote her out of this.
James Baumgartner: Oh, wow. The film seemed sort of one part biography and one part detective story trying to find everything.
Rebecca Bertrand: It’s a pretty incredible journey. The film’s director, Pamela Green takes you on this journey where she’s going through trying to find descendents of Alice. She’s trying to find different archives that could have film pieces. She also uncovers a really interesting interview that was done in the 1960s with her daughter Simone, but unfortunately it was the interview was done on a format of film that they couldn’t view it anymore. So there’s some really interesting work through film archives to try to piece back how you can recover a lost film so that they can even see this interview with her daughter.
James Baumgartner: newportFILM screens many movies throughout the year, but people can’t go see films in person right now. How are you able to share this film with audiences right now?
Rebecca Bertrand: So, newportFILM is a documentary film series. And like you said, we do have large scale screenings where we bring the community together and often work with different community partners to bring films to our community. It’s always all documentaries. We are doing this film screening in partnership with the Preservation Society of Newport County, and Shall Not Be Denied which is the collaboration between the Rhode Island Department of State and the Humanities Council to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage. And our attempt in these types of social distancing was to provide some way to connect with our audience. And provide some documentary film content. So each week we’re rolling out a different film to stream for free or to rent that’s paired with an opportunity to talk to the filmmakers through a Facebook Live q&a. So all you need to do is go to newportFILM.com and RSVP and you’ll receive a unique link to watch the film through Thursday night at 11:59pm. I know a lot of people are saying what are we going to watch tonight on Netflix. And so we’re hoping to provide a little bit of content and hopefully some engagement with filmmakers like we would if it were a normal time and we had a film screening with a Q&A afterwards.
