‘L’Arroseur Arrosé’: cinema’s first-ever comedy film
Comedy comes in innumerable different forms, so it’s fitting that cinema’s first-ever comedic film is known by a multitude of different names. No matter what it’s called, though, L’Arroseur Arrosé will always retain its place in the history books.
Written and directed by Louis Lumière, one half of the pioneering pair of siblings who became known as being among the medium’s founding fathers, existing as the first instance of the moving image being used to engineer laughs is far from being its solitary history-making accolade.
It was also the first use of film to tell a story that was entirely fictional, as well as the first to use a promotional poster as a marketing technique to draw attention. Obviously, these are things that have been taken for granted for well over a century at this point, but somebody has to get there first.
Originally known as Le Jardinier or Le Jardinier et le petit espiègle, when the film made its way across to the United Kingdom and beyond its moniker was translated to either The Tables Turned on the Gardner or The Sprinkler Sprinkled. The last one is definitely the catchiest, but there’s no point splitting hairs when there’s history to be made.
First screening in June of 1895, L’Arroseur Arrosé may only run for a brief 45 seconds, but it was a trailblazer nonetheless. Using one of the oldest gags in the book, a gardener is being prevented from carrying out his duties by a wayward boy who keeps stepping on the hose he’s using to try and water the plants.
When he puts the nozzle directly to his face to investigate the problem up close and personal, it goes without saying what happens next. Sure enough, he takes a faceful of water and even loses his hat, chasing the boy around in cinema’s first-ever slapstick caper. Thanks to the limitations of the technology, the camera remains static, but the Lumières had once again carved out a unique slice of history by taking it upon themselves to break down another barrier.
At the time, audiences had only seen celluloid used to display everyday events, with the concept of using cinema as a means to tell narrative tales concocted exclusively for the medium as a foreign concept. The Lumières were always ahead of the curve in that respect, with viewers pleasantly surprised by a scripted, rehearsed, and comedic film because they’d literally seen nothing like it before.
Because nobody gave a shit about copyright protection in those days – with the exception of Thomas Edison attempting to exert a stranglehold over cinema – L’Arroseur Arrosé was remade countless times, with Georges Méliès releasing his own the following year. Imitation has always been the sincerest form of flattery, but there’s only one film that stands as the first-ever comedy, and it’s Louis Lumière’s.
