A film about researching a film

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 granchidren 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!!!)