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The Cabbage Fairy
Shortly after a visit from (or to) the Lumieres, Leon Gaumont produced his own version of their 60mm camera, which he called the Gaumont Chronophotographe. Gaumont and his staff regularly took pictures with his new invention, but Gaumont was hard-pushed to find a practical use for it. His secretary, Alice Guy, however, had understood its potential immediately upon first viewing the contraption with Gaumont at his meeting with the Lumieres. In her autobiography, Autobiography of a Film Pioneer, Guy recounts:
“I thought I could do better… Gathering up my courage, I timidly proposed to Gaumont that I would write one or two short plays and make them for the amusement of my friends. If the developments which evolved from this proposal could have been foreseen, then I probably never would have obtained his agreement. My youth, my lack of experience, my sex all conspired against me.”
“What! What!” responded the taken-aback inventor, “All right, if you want to,” Gaumont is then credited in some quarters with saying: “It’s a child’s toy, anyhow.”
Gaumont’s permission was conditional on Guy continuing her secretarial duties. She immediately began making short films intended as demonstrations for potential clients and then, possibly in early 1896, she produced her first narrative film: La Fee Aux Chou (The Cabbage Fairy), a story based on a fairy tale about a fairy who makes children in a cabbage patch. The movie was just one minute long, and featured Guy's friend (and later secretary) Yvonne Mugnier-Serand in the title role.
Worried by his secretary’s comings and goings, Gaumont supplied Guy with a small house on the Rue des Sonneries, close to his photographic laboratory. Guy wrote in her book:
I was given an unused terrace with an asphalt floor (making it impossible to fix a real set). It was covered with a shaky glass roof and overlooked an empty lot. In this place, I made my debut as a director. A sheet painted by a neighbourhood painter who specialised primarily in scarecrows and the like; a vague set – rows of cabbages constructed by a carpenter; costumes rented around the Porte St Martin. The cast: my friends, a crying baby, a worried mother. My first film thus saw the light.”
That Alice Guy can lay claim to be the world’s first female film director is beyond doubt, however claims made on her behalf that she is also the first director of a narrative film are less clear cut. Many historians credit Georges Melies with being the first narrative director for his film Le Manoir du Diable. Unfortunately, La Fee aux Chou no longer exists and so cannot be accurately dated. Some historians claim Guy’s movie may have been made as late as 1900, although the fact that Guy directed a remake of the original (and also appeared in it in drag) entitled La Fee aux Choux, ou la Naissance des Enfants in 1900 doesn’t make matters any clearer. [ADD]
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