Cinema
The Cabbage Patch Fairy
La Fée aux choux
Alice Guy · 1900
Synopsis
In the surviving version, an elegantly dressed fairy walks into the middle of a patch of giant cabbages, painted on the set. She goes from one to another, bends down and draws from behind their leaves living newborns, which she places in the foreground; dolls come out of the last cabbages. The film stages the old belief that babies are born in cabbages.
Context
Alice Guy, then secretary to Léon Gaumont, had attended the presentation of the Lumière cinématographe on 22 March 1895, and soon afterwards began shooting small fictions for the firm. She claimed to have shot a first version of this film in 1896, now lost. The surviving version, entered in the Gaumont catalogue in 1900, was found in 1996 in a Swedish archive; the fairy is played in it by Yvonne Sérand. She returned to the subject in 1902 in Sage-femme de première classe, in which a young couple comes to choose a child from a merchant woman.
Who it is for
A film barely a minute long, to be seen with the other short films made by its author at Gaumont at the turn of the century.
Prizes and reception
Ranked among the very first fiction films in cinema, it appears in the box sets that Gaumont and Kino devoted to the early years of the company.
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