Page 185 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Alice Guy-Blaché: The Cabbage-Patch Fairy 1896.
Alice Guy-Blaché was the first woman to direct a film, to produce a film, and to become the art- director (and co-owner) of a film production company. The Cabbage-Patch Fairy is her first film.She began her film career by working for Leon Gaumont, then staying with him when he founded the Gaumont Film Company, where she persuaded him to let her direct her own film. In these early days of ‘the cinema of attraction’ there was little or no intimation that cinema could be a terrific narrative medium - it was regarded like a firework display or a sensational event - not as a medium that might eventually threaten the novel. Guy-Blaché thought otherwise, and attempted to prove it with The Cabbage-Patch Fairy - although only 60 seconds long, there is a clear narrative base, and it was enough to convince Gaumont - and others who backed her Solax Film Company after she moved to America in 1907. Andre Bazin and others have pointed out that until the establishment of the male- dominated Hollywood industrial-film business, woman directors were in fact in the majority, so Guy- Blaché began a trend in film-making that lasted 2 or more decades.
Mark Cousins has this to say about Guy Blaché (whom he introduces as 'the overlooked Alice Guy- Blaché' : ... “ (she) directed perhaps the first ever scripted film, a comic fantasy about babies born in cabbage-patches. Guy Blaché experimented with sound, visual effects, and even hand-painted directly onto film. Most of her subsequent films were biblical epics, and she created one of the first film studios, Solax, in New York State where she had emigrated in 1907. In total she is thought to have directed as many as 700 short films, including Westerns and thrillers." (Mark Cousins: The Story of Film 2004). Other historians point out that until the Movies became 'big business' in the 1920s, women were in fact were in the majority among directors and producers:
"In the early days of film, women such as Alice Guy, Gene Gauntier, Hanna Henning, Ida May Park, Olga Preobrazhenskaya, Nell Shipman, Ruth Stonehouse, Lucille McVey Drew, Elvira Notari, Lois Weber, Dorothy Arzner, Germaine Dulac, Marie Epstein, Grace Cunard, and many others were involved in creating the new visual format. Unfortunately, when the first surveys of film history were written, and when the first pantheons of directors and major players were drawn up, most of the accomplishments of women directors, producers, and scenarists were overlooked." (Gwendolyn Audrey Foster in Women Filmmakers and Directors (at filmdirectorsite.com)”