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First StepsFilm 5 of 17
The Cabbage-Patch Fairy
La Fée aux choux
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Alice Guy, Gaumont, Paris. A fairy in white lifts living babies from painted cabbages and sets them on the ground; a doll goes back as not ready. About a minute. Guy and Léon Gaumont both dated her first version to 1896; that print is lost. The surviving film, found at the Svenska Filminstitutet in 1996, matches the 1900 Gaumont catalogue: Yvonne Mugnier-Serand in a cabbage patch, no couple. She remade the idea again in 1902 as Sage-femme de première classe.
In two programmes
The job: stage a story. Guy lifts babies out of painted cabbages and sends a doll back as not ready. A minute long and already a director's film: a set, a performer, a joke with a rule inside it.
Women Pioneers of Silent Cinema
Alice Guy was Gaumont's house director, already assigning herself the fiction films, when she put a fairy in a cabbage patch and treated it as catalogue product rather than a parlor trick. She and Léon Gaumont later dated her first version to 1896; that print is lost. The surviving film, identified at the Svenska Filminstitutet in 1996, matches the 1900 Gaumont listing (Yvonne Mugnier-Serand, no honeymoon couple), and she remade the idea in 1902 as Sage-femme de première classe. A minute of painted vegetables is how a woman already in charge of a Paris studio tested what a story on film could be.
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