(Note: Due to the 1896 version being lost media, the video here is a remake by Alice Guy from 1900. It is often incorrectly cited as the 1896 original.)
Alice Guy was born in Paris on July 1, 1874, and began her career as a secretary for inventor and industrialist Léon Gaumont in 1894. She directed La Fée aux Choux as a means of demonstrating the possibilities of the camera manufactured by Gaumont, in the process not only producing quite possibly the first fantasy film but becoming the first female film director!
The film was based on a French children’s tale that boys are born in cabbages and girls in roses (a cabbage supposedly resembling a baby’s head). It was quite long for its time, clocking at 1 minute! Guy was soon promoted to the company’s head of motion picture production and directed most of their films until 1905. She not only experimented with cinematic techniques (running film backward, double exposure, etc.) but also used Gaumont’s Chronophone to produce around 100 “sound” films between 1906 and 1907.
Over time, a lot of her accomplishments were forgotten or attributed to her male colleagues. Today only a few of films she produced remain.
Bibliography
IMDb contributors (n.d.). ‘La fée aux choux (1896)’, IMDb. Available at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0223341/ [Accessed: 22 December 2021].
Noble P. et al. (2013). ‘Languages of love: 10 unusual terms of endearment’, BBC News, 30 May. Available at: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22699938 [Accessed: 22 December 2021].
popegrutch (2014). ‘Cabbage Fairy (1896)’, Century Film Project, 28 May. Available at: https://centuryfilmproject.org/2014/05/28/cabbage-fairy-1896/ [Accessed: 22 December 2021].
The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica (2021). ‘Alice Guy-Blanché’. Encyclopædia Britannica, 27 June. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alice-Guy-Blache [Accessed: 22 December 2021].
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