"Madame's Cravings" is one of the most amusing and one of the best films from Alice Guy's oeuvre available today. It applies a couple staples from earlier films--one distinctly from Guy's filmography--within a more-elaborate early narrative construction of 16 shots, including four close-ups and not counting title cards, in a runtime of only about four minutes. With a narrative revolving around a pregnant woman, there's a considerable amount of sexual symbolism in the proceedings, as well.
The more common staple from early cinema employed here is that of the facial-expression genre. Many films in the "cinema of attractions" mode were no more than a single shot-scene of an actor making funny reaction faces. Guy and every other prominent filmmaker of the day made them. There were also dramatic grimace pictures, such as those akin to mug shots, as in the early use of a dolly-inward close-up for "Photographing of a Female Crook" (1904). In "Madame's Cravings," the insert close-ups are employed for the comedic effect of gazing upon a pregnant woman satisfying her cravings after stealing consumables from others--and as her husband tirelessly pushes their first child around in a stroller and attempting to diffuse the situations his wife's pregnant cravings put him in.
The other shared theme here is unique to Guy, which is that of the cabbage-patch folklore of human reproduction. Later in life, in interviews and her memoir, Guy-Blaché claimed that her first film, made in 1896, was of a cabbage-patch fairy overseeing the birth of children in the garden. Regardless of whether that's true, a film usually dated c.1900 and attributed to Guy, "The Cabbage-Patch Fairy" does exist today and remains a pleasant example of the cinema-of-attractions mode of early cinema, where there is a direct address, absent a fourth wall, between the figure and presentation on screen and the spectator. In 1902, Guy remade this scenario in narrative form as "Midwife to the Upper Class" (1902), a two-shot, three-character (plus the babies) parody of the reproductive fairy tale. "Madame's Cravings," then, may be viewed as the conclusion of Guy's surviving trilogy of cabbage-patch films, as this one concludes with the pregnant protagonist falling over into a cabbage patch, from which she presents, or is presented with, a newborn. Containing both story and close-up spectacle, it's the best of both cinematic worlds of attractions and narrative.
The lascivious part is in the display of the madame's cravings leading up to her giving birth. As Alison McMahan (author of "Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema"), for one, points out, the character steals and delights in such phallic objects as a lollipop and a pipe and enjoys all by way of mouth, which McMahan claims alludes to fellatio, as highlighted by the emblematic close-up shots The vagrant she steals the herring from also appears overly energetic with his hand in reaching into his pockets as madame comes around the corner. Consequently, the cabbage patch seems to remain here as a relic--no longer part of a childish fantasy--as Guy suggests sex as the true cabbage patch of cravings from which children are born. Regardless, it's unlikely a filmmaker back then other than the world's first female director, Guy, would make a picture that makes such fun of a woman's insatiable desires--just as none other appear to have given such consideration to human reproduction, sexual or otherwise. Or a consistent female address and satire of gender relations in her films, as continued in, say, "A Sticky Woman," "The Consequences of Feminism" or even by the prominence of women in her passion play, "La Vie du Christ" (all 1906). If ever there were an argument for diversity in filmmaking, Guy was it, and to demonstrate how to construct the cinematic gaze upon a female subject to be enjoyed by an all-gendered gaze, "Madame's Cravings" is exemplary, too.
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