Sometimes in my dotage I despair that to many movie-centric websites, film as an art form seems to have started in the early 1980s. This gets my goat. That is bad, for I need that goat. I milk the goat to provide milk for my wife’s morning coffee. (Shhhh! She knows nothing of the goat.) As a remedy to this (the internet machine’s cinematic tunnel-vision, not the goat), for the next fifty weeks, I am going to exclusively explore films made before 1950. It will be fun and edumacational as all hell. Please join me.
First under my microscope is L’arroseur Arrose from 1895. The title of this very short film is something of an idiom and cannot be directly translated into English; the closest we can come is The Gardener Gardened or The Sprinkler Sprinkled. it is a living piece of history.
One of the first films by the Lumiere Brothers, who pioneered both photographing motion pictures and their exhibition, L’arroseur Arrose has been called the first comedy film by no less an expert than Gerald Mast, author of The Comic Mind, the seminal book on the subject. If you have never read it, you had better do that now. I’ll wait...
(Whistles. Sighs. Fixes self a sandwich.)
THE PLOT IN BRIEF: A gardener (Francois Clerc) waters plants. A mischievous boy (Leon Trotobas) steps on the gardener’s hose, stopping the flow of water. The gardener is flummoxed. He looks down into the hose to assess the problem. Just then, the boy takes his foot off the hose, causing the water to flow again, and (spoiler alert!) the gardener gets a face full of water. Instantly recognizing the source of his mishap, the gardener chases the boy and spanks him. Because the camera does not move, the two characters move all over the frame. It takes longer to read this synopsis than it takes to view the actual film.
Don’t believe me? You can watch the entire thing right here:
Proving one can over-intellectualize anything, Gerald Mast makes the following points about L’arroseur Arrose: “It is not worth trying to turn this little film into a miniature chef d’oeuvre (a masterpiece, the most outstanding creation of an artist) of the comic intellect. But the extreme simplicity of the compound makes it very easy to analyze its chemistry. The elements of the film are four: 1) a comic protagonist wants to perform a task; 2) a comic antagonist interferes with that performance; 3) a comic object begins as a tool and ends as a weapon; 4) the protagonist makes a comic discovery of the problem and takes action on the basis of that discovery. Each of these elements exists in a very simple, uncomplicated form in the film.”
TANGENT: When the Academy Museum first opened in Hollywood, they hosted a magnificent special exhibition of early motion toys titled “The Path to Cinema: Highlights from the Richard Balzer Collection,” which included flipbooks, zoetropes, praxinoscopes, and a special corner devoted to the founding work of the Lumiere Brothers. I had never before seen these 130-year-old films look that good. I guess when you have the weight of the Oscars behind you, you can demand first or second- generation prints.
Interestingly enough, the Lumiere brothers would film this short again the following year. The 1896 version of L’arroseur Arrose features a different antagonist and a slightly different ending. I cannot find definitive proof of why the film was remade. I theorize that either 1) the original was so popular that the Lumieres wore out their original negative and, at 41 seconds, it was easier for them to just film it again; or 2) the filmmakers were responding to overwhelming audience feedback that insisted that the mischievous antagonist should be soaked as well. While the gardener is played by the same actor, the mischievous boy in the remake is noticeably older, and I theorize that is to make the new concluding joke funnier because it removes the “mean streak” inherent in turning a hose on a small boy. A teenager, it seems, is just asking for it.
Jane Gaines, Professor of Film at Columbia University and Professor Emerita of Literature and English at Duke University, has published a critical essay in the Cultural Studies journal titled "Early Cinema’s Heyday of Copying: The Too Many Copies of L’Arroseur Arrosé" which deals with this interesting phenomenon. Apparently, there are actually THREE different versions of L’arroseur Arrose floating around.
Here is the 1896 “remake,” for comparison:
As I tumbled down the Lumiere rabbit hole researching this column, I found out all sorts of things I did not know, though I taught this film for over thirty years during my previous day job as a high-school teacher. (My current day job being “layabout.”) I found out the names of the actors in the film. I discovered that a statue was erected to honor this exact Lumiere short in Bescancon, France. Here are three pictures of it; it’s terrific in its conception and execution. This statue makes me want to fly out to France to see it, which is unusual because I am loathe to haul my fat ass anywhere, much less overseas. I think it would be utterly terrific if all tourists, happily entering the space between the two buildings where this statue is on display, were to get completely soaked by local lads brandishing real hoses squirting copious amounts of real water.
The Sprinkler sprinkled, indeed.
First under my microscope is L’arroseur Arrose from 1895. The title of this very short film is something of an idiom and cannot be directly translated into English; the closest we can come is The Gardener Gardened or The Sprinkler Sprinkled. it is a living piece of history.
(Whistles. Sighs. Fixes self a sandwich.)
THE PLOT IN BRIEF: A gardener (Francois Clerc) waters plants. A mischievous boy (Leon Trotobas) steps on the gardener’s hose, stopping the flow of water. The gardener is flummoxed. He looks down into the hose to assess the problem. Just then, the boy takes his foot off the hose, causing the water to flow again, and (spoiler alert!) the gardener gets a face full of water. Instantly recognizing the source of his mishap, the gardener chases the boy and spanks him. Because the camera does not move, the two characters move all over the frame. It takes longer to read this synopsis than it takes to view the actual film.
Don’t believe me? You can watch the entire thing right here:
Proving one can over-intellectualize anything, Gerald Mast makes the following points about L’arroseur Arrose: “It is not worth trying to turn this little film into a miniature chef d’oeuvre (a masterpiece, the most outstanding creation of an artist) of the comic intellect. But the extreme simplicity of the compound makes it very easy to analyze its chemistry. The elements of the film are four: 1) a comic protagonist wants to perform a task; 2) a comic antagonist interferes with that performance; 3) a comic object begins as a tool and ends as a weapon; 4) the protagonist makes a comic discovery of the problem and takes action on the basis of that discovery. Each of these elements exists in a very simple, uncomplicated form in the film.”
TANGENT: When the Academy Museum first opened in Hollywood, they hosted a magnificent special exhibition of early motion toys titled “The Path to Cinema: Highlights from the Richard Balzer Collection,” which included flipbooks, zoetropes, praxinoscopes, and a special corner devoted to the founding work of the Lumiere Brothers. I had never before seen these 130-year-old films look that good. I guess when you have the weight of the Oscars behind you, you can demand first or second- generation prints.
Jane Gaines, Professor of Film at Columbia University and Professor Emerita of Literature and English at Duke University, has published a critical essay in the Cultural Studies journal titled "Early Cinema’s Heyday of Copying: The Too Many Copies of L’Arroseur Arrosé" which deals with this interesting phenomenon. Apparently, there are actually THREE different versions of L’arroseur Arrose floating around.
Here is the 1896 “remake,” for comparison:
As I tumbled down the Lumiere rabbit hole researching this column, I found out all sorts of things I did not know, though I taught this film for over thirty years during my previous day job as a high-school teacher. (My current day job being “layabout.”) I found out the names of the actors in the film. I discovered that a statue was erected to honor this exact Lumiere short in Bescancon, France. Here are three pictures of it; it’s terrific in its conception and execution. This statue makes me want to fly out to France to see it, which is unusual because I am loathe to haul my fat ass anywhere, much less overseas. I think it would be utterly terrific if all tourists, happily entering the space between the two buildings where this statue is on display, were to get completely soaked by local lads brandishing real hoses squirting copious amounts of real water.
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