The Cabbage Fairy (1900). 1 minute. Written and directed by Alice Guy-Blaché. Starring Yvonne Sérand (as the fairy).
The Cabbage Fairy is a short film by Alice Guy-Blaché, the world’s first female filmmaker. Originally based out of Paris and employed by the Gaumont Film Company (where she developed the Gaumont house style), Guy-Blaché worked as a director, producer, writer, and editor between 1896 and 1920, making approximately 1,000 (mostly silent) films during this period, of which 150 survive. Eventually she relocated to Fort Lee, New Jersey where she founded the Solax film studio in 1910, a time when films were exploding in popularity.
Many of her films are considered to be lost or else are not adequately documented, and Guy-Blaché herself has often been neglected as the pioneer that she was, with many of her films being misattributed to other, male filmmakers. Her work was a major influence on directors Alfred Hitchcock and Sergei Eisenstein (among others), and paved the way for early female filmmakers Lois Weber and Dorothy Arzner. Guy-Blaché’s filmography is currently in a period of popular rediscovery—thanks in part to conservation efforts and archival research, including the documentary film Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018). The Cabbage Fairy is a good example of how Guy-Blaché, who pioneered short narrative film, could make a non-narrative subject compelling, delightful, and even mysterious. At barely a minute long, it is a suitable introduction to her interest in women’s stories and her characteristic sense of humor.
First, a bit of history. Early filmmaking was characterized by an atmosphere of experimentation fueled by cutting-edge technology and equipment, and the exploratory spirit of the times was reflected in the rapid development of innovative approaches to depicting activity on the screen. In this period, when cinema was young, there were few rules in filmmaking, and the pressure to produce films that resulted in high financial returns was not yet a feature of the industry; so directors had free reign to choose from subjects and scenarios as they pleased. Indeed, due to the nature of the early medium, most people making movies in 1900 would not have believed that their enterprise would evolve into a business-driven and astonishingly lucrative industry. In 1900, it was was not even clear whether the phenomenon of filmmaking was just a blip in history or whether the appeal of movies would endure.
Guy-Blaché’s work spans from this earliest phase of filmmaking to the period in which the industry really took off. She was present with her employer Léon Gaumont at the historic 1895 film screening in Paris where Auguste and Louis Lumière debuted their filmmaking technology and screened their short movie Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. Guy-Blaché began making films immediately thereafter. By the time she arrived in America and opened the Solax studio in Fort Lee, the New Jersey city was on its way to transforming into an American film epicenter—the Hollywood of the east coast before there was a Hollywood. Indeed, Fort Lee was populated by the studios that would later become mainstays in the Southern California film industry. Guy-Blaché was a leader in the effort to establish an American studio system in those early days.
In all stages of her career—both in Paris and in Fort Lee—Guy-Blaché was a creative innovator. Her French movies, which were contemporaries of the Lumière brothers’ output, engaged in the full range of experimentation that was undertaken during this period. Indeed, when we consider her films, we should position them within the context of the films of her contemporaries (and competitors). The earliest films made by the Lumières and Thomas Edison, for example, were primarily limited to demonstrations of the burgeoning technology or to documentary-like footage of travel and exotic locales. At a time when film was still a novelty, short non-narrative movies by Edison’s studio such as Fred Ott’s Sneeze (1894) and The Kiss (1896) were conceived of as exhibition pieces.
Guy-Blaché took this fairly pedestrian mode of cinema and transformed it into a medium dominated by narrative subjects. Her films, most (but not all) of which are short subjects, consist of both narrative and non-narrative formats and take the form of many genres, including romances (What Will People Say? [1916]), comedies (The Glue [1907] and The Drunken Mattress [1906]), sentimental dramas (Falling Leaves [1912]), dance attractions (Serpentine Dance [1900]), and religious spectacles (The Life of Christ [1906]). A number of her films address serious social issues such as anti-Semitism, child abuse, the politics of labor, and immigration (Making an American Citizen [1912]). Many of the films tackle male-female relationships (Matrimony’s Speed Limit [1913] and A House Divided [1913]) and gender roles (The Consequences of Feminism [1906]), sometimes with what would especially at the time have appeared to be a raunchy touch (A Sticky Woman [1906]). The diversity of the film subjects she undertook in quick succession suggests a vigorous mind.
In addition to narrative experimentation, her films bear the mark of other innovations, including groundbreaking casting choices. Notably, A Fool and His Money (1912) featured one of cinema’s first all African American casts. Guy-Blaché also broke ground through her use of child actors in an era when that was perceived of as novel. She filmed on sets and on location, making use of the outdoors and natural settings as she deemed necessary, and even worked with wild animals. Guy-Blaché engaged in new challenges related to staging: a number of her films involve chase sequences and complex physical comedy. Moreover, some Guy-Blaché films exhibit technical experimentation with double exposures, color tinting, split screens, and early synchronized soundtracks (the latter were featured in films known as phonoscènes, which were essentially proto-music videos). Guy-Blaché played a direct role in bringing these developments to the screen, and her multi-faceted involvement in the filmmaking process demonstrates her agile and hands-on approach to her craft.
What then is the earliest example of Guy-Blaché’s style of filmmaking? We would have to look to the original 1896 Cabbage Fairy to see her taking on her first subject. The film is valuable to us at the very least because from what we can determine, it is both the first narrative film and the first film made by a woman; however, it is considered lost. The 1900 Cabbage Fairy, which is a non-narrative remake of part of the original 1896 film, was discovered in a Swedish archive in 1996 and is only the second of four cabbage patch-related films that Guy-Blaché created. In addition to the 1896 and 1900 films, she directed a 1902 film on the theme, Midwife to the Upper Class, which was originally also titled The Cabbage Fairy. A fourth film, Madame’s Cravings (1907), while ostensibly about a pregnant woman’s eating habits, gives a nod to the vegetable subject. All four films focus on female protagonists and issues of traditional importance to women, such as marriage, pregnancy, and children. (Although the 1896 film is lost, we have confirmation of its plot from then-contemporary sources.)
The 1900 Cabbage Fairy is barely a minute long, yet in spite of its brief running time, it manages to speak obliquely to the female experience through its female fairy and subject matter, as well as to evoke a fair amount of humor and quirkiness. What we see is fairly simple: a beautifully dressed fairy, who resembles a Gibson Girl, pulls live, naked babies out from behind cabbages and then places them on the ground mostly out of sight. They are plopped down crying without anything or anyone to hold them up. The combination of the unhappy babies with the smiling fairy is decidedly odd and more than a little bit silly.
For some reason the fairy pulls out creepy-looking dolls from the last two cabbages—perhaps because there are only so many live babies a filmmaker can pile around the edge of a set without incurring suspicion. But the use of the dolls after the babies is slightly anti-climactic. Perhaps if the fairy were to begin by pulling out dolls and then graduate to live babies, the film would feel more like it is building towards something. Still, it is not as though the dolls are less strange or surprising than the actual infants, so it is fair to say that The Cabbage Fairy does not lose any of its peculiar energy as the activity progresses.
As it is, there is no narrative in the 1900 movie, unlike in its predecessor and successors. How do we appreciate such a short and non-narrative specimen of film? We might start by acknowledging that although The Cabbage Fairy does not precisely tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end, it does nevertheless have a beginning, middle, and end: the cabbage fairy poses repeatedly, pulls live babies from oversized cabbages, poses some more, then pulls dolls from cabbages. The film ends with more posing. So although there is no story per se, there is a clear sequence of events; the fairy’s movements are comprehensible and can be narrativized in their own way.
Understanding the 1900 film’s place in more general film history, its relationship to other films by Guy-Blaché specifically, and the sequence of events it depicts is an effective and direct way of approaching it, but we must also appreciate the subtext of the 1900 Cabbage Fairy. In particular, while officially non-narrative, it channels a traditional story commonly told to children in the late nineteenth century: the cabbage fairy is a kind of alternative stork, and the cabbage patch is where she plucks out babies for delivery. Parents employed this sanitized fairy tale with their children to address the topic of reproduction and avoid a more direct discussion regarding sex.
Does The Cabbage Fairy therefore reinforce the importance and usefulness of this folklore by staging and enacting it? Could The Cabbage Fairy almost be a kind of parental teaching tool? Perhaps, and yet the film—with its grinning fairy and comically crying, awkward babies—seems too humorous for that approach to work. Instead of reinforcing cultural euphemisms, the fairy’s over-perkiness and the crying infants bring out the silliness of the sexless cabbage patch story that nineteenth-century parents relied on to redact the real origin of babies. Fundamentally, there is something too goofy about what we see for it to be very useful to sexually shy parents.
Because the fable of the cabbage patch is silly, and The Cabbage Fairy makes it appear even sillier, we might be tempted to think that all of what we see can be written off as a mild-mannered spoof. We should acknowledge, however, that the film, in spite of its miniscule length, also has something of a daring side. However many steps away from sex the film may be removed, the mere act of dramatizing the origins of babies inadvertently does put a real sexual subtext on the screen. Edison’s short film The Kiss scandalized the world for a brief period because of its image of an unmarried couple kissing. The Cabbage Fairy does not involve romantic physical contact in the way that The Kiss does. However, once The Cabbage Fairy’s central metaphor is acknowledged, the 1900 film becomes weirdly and indirectly connected to the sexual context of Edison’s controversial film—too polite and implicit to ruffle anyone’s feathers, but related nonetheless.
Finally, it is worth noting that the 1900 Cabbage Fairy as a fairy tale is a part of the larger context of early silent fantasy films from this period. In this way, even though the The Cabbage Fairy is non-narrative, it relates to the narrative films of Georges Méliès, who also embarked on a filmmaking career in 1896 as a result of the Lumière exhibition and would eventually create over 500 films. Both Guy-Blaché and Méliès worked as contemporaries at their respective studios in France, but whereas much of Guy-Blaché’s surviving work tends towards comedic or melodramatic realism, Méliès’ movies, including The Kingdom of the Fairies (1903) and the iconic A Trip to the Moon (1902), lean heavily on science fiction and supernatural plots. Guy-Blaché may not have gone down the same path as Méliès after the 1900 Cabbage Fairy, but she did experiment with the tradition of fantastic images on screen that he helped to popularize.
Exploring early film is like taking a spin on a roulette wheel. You never know what you will find because there was such a rich diversity of stories being told—or, in the case of The Cabbage Fairy, a wealth of activity being recorded. The Cabbage Fairy, much like its contemporaries, demonstrates that the visual medium of film is so strong in its storytelling potential that even one minute of posing with vegetables can fascinate 125 years later.
