Passer d'un rêve à l'autre / To pass from one dream to another

Alice Guy – La Fée aux choux ou la naissance des enfants, 1900

2026

Short film, silent
1'12"

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Born in 1873 in Saint-Mandé, France
Died in 1968 in Wayne, United States

Life is ready for harvest in one of the earliest narrative films ever made. In The Cabbage Fairy, Alice Guy brings to the screen a folktale about babies being born beneath cabbage leaves. At a moment when cinema was still discovering its narrative possibilities, the film spun a playful fiction around the origins of human life. Mothers are absent as are the bodies, pain, blood and labour through which life ordinarily begins. Birth appears as an effortless process of collection, display and distribution, while the reproductive labour that sustains new life remains entirely out of view.

Alice Guy was a filmmaker, screenwriter and production director who played a decisive role in the early development of narrative cinema. Active from the late nineteenth century, she was instrumental in shaping cinema as both a language and an industry. Drawing on everyday life, literature and popular tales, she developed a mode of staging that combines humour, narrative and experimentation with special effects techniques.

Artist(s)

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