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In Alice Guy's 1896 minute-long film "La fée aux choux," which she wrote, directed, and produced herself, is the world's first narrative fiction film.  
In the footage a fairy prances around a garden of cabbages, magically birthing human babies out of the brassicas, plucking them from the foliage, and laying them in a pile before striking a graceful tendu arabesque in her floor-length dress. There is something deeply captivating about La Fée aux Choux, the oversized cabbages tell you this is a fantasy while the fairy beckons you to observe the pleasant unreality of babies being born in a garden. 
Alice Guy directed her first version of La Fée aux Choux in 1896 and thatone it was different from the 1900 version; she also made a new version in 1902. Guy-Blaché's 1896 film was the first to bring a story to an audience and the first to have a written scenario, which Guy-Blaché also wrote. The 1896 is considered to be lost; the version was filmed on 60-millimeter film and was about 30 meters (about 90 feet) long. The 1900 version of La Fée aux Choux is on 35-millimeter film and is about sixty seconds long, she employed one actress (the fairy), two live babies, and a number of dolls. The 1902 version is on 35-millimeter film and is about four minutes long, this version was later retitled Sage-femme de première classe (Midwife First Class) and the director employed a honeymoon couple and a female baby merchant along with numerous babies and dolls. Alice Guy-Blaché (director/lead) dressed as a man is performing as the lover (called husband), Yvonne Mugnier-Serand (lead) and Germaine Mugnier-Serand (lead). All three versions refer to an old and popular French fairy tale in which baby boys are born in cabbages, and baby girls are born in roses.  
From memoirs, newspapers, letters, public records, and photographs, we gain a sense of how the first La Fée aux Choux surprised and delighted its audience, and how it awoke the world of theater, entertainment, and artistic expression to a new medium. That first film sold 80 copies. Alice was a natural at filming and was eager to master her skills. Gaumont, satisfied with her success, made her head of production and she produced over a hundred of short films with the company. 
 
When Alice Guy Blaché talked about her original 1896 version of La Fée aux Choux, she pointed out the difficulties of the endeavor and her mistakes. The backdrop was not “the best” because it was painted by a local painter of ladies’ fans. The backdrop ruffled in the wind because it was not fastened securely to the wall behind it. The mother of the baby jumped into the field of focus. And, perhaps most regrettably, the cabbages were painted a bright green. They would have been effective as stage decorations under bright lights--and there is no brighter light than the sun--but the bright green looked black on the early film which, Alice explained, “only recorded a small range of the black-and-white spectrum and produced images that were too sharply contrasted.” 
 
Because of the delicate coloring of the cabbages, we can be sure that the earlier version that we have is the 1900 version, definitely not her 1896 version of La Fée aux Choux--nor can it possibly be a copy of the 1896 version since she would have had to repaint or remake the cabbage decorations. The scenery in the 1900 version indicates that Alice has already discovered by her earlier experience the pitfall of coloring the cabbages bright green. 
 
 It's no secret that nowadays Hollywood is a boys' club — only about 9% of the top 250 grossing films of 2012 were directed by women — but it hasn't always been that way. In fact, many of the highest-earning screenwriters in the early era of Hollywood were women, and women on screen were taking on diverse, complex roles. 
It isn't a stretch to say that having more women writing the scripts and calling the shots behind the scenes helped make films of Hollywood's Golden Age more interesting, they were heirs of the Alice Guy and Pioneer era films .  
Some of the most innovative and influential directors of the early days of film history together with Alice Guy include Frances Marion, director, two-time Academy Award winning screenwriter, she was a legend of the silent film era; Marion E. Wong, pioneer for Asian-American cinema, director and founder of Mandarin Film Company in Oakland, California before 1920; the director and film editor Dorothy Arzner, California-born, gay and feminist, Arzner was a fixture in Hollywood that unlike many, Arzner was able to find success in both silent and "talkie" films; Germaine Dulac, Helena Cortesina, Lois Weber, Rosario Pi, Mabel Normand, Elena Jordi, Marie-Louise Iribe, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, Musidora, Dorothy Arzner, Mary Ellen Bute. They directed dramas, comedies, animation, avant-garde or fantastic…. Pushing the limits of storytelling and aesthetics, their films were courageous, inventive and exciting. Without them, the whole art of filming would have been different. 

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Film studies, Art, Art history.

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