The Waterer Watered - L'Arroseur Arrosé (1895) FULL VIDEO

 

 

The Waterer Watered - Original Title: L'Arroseur Arrosé (1895)

Director: Louis Lumière

Cast: François Clerc, Benoît Duval

Release Date: December 28, 1895

Country of Origin: France

While a gardener is innocently watering his plants, an impudent youngster pulls a practical joke on him.

While a gardener is watering his flowers, a naughty child approaches from behind and steps on the water hose. Startled, the gardener investigates the nozzle to determine why the water is no longer flowing. When the youngster removes his foot from the hose, water shoots up into the gardener's face. The gardener pursues the youngster, slaps him in the buttocks, and grabs his ear. The gardener keeps watering while the boy flees.

The video, which was shot in Lyon in the spring of 1895, depicts a straightforward practical prank in which a child torments a gardener by stepping on the hose he uses to water his plants, stopping the water flow. The youngster steps off the hose as the gardener tilts the nozzle up to examine it, spraying the gardener with water. He is drenched, stunned, and has his cap knocked off, but he quickly understands. Up until the gardener catches the youngster and spanks him, there is a chase that takes place both on and off screen (the camera never shifts from its initial location). Even though the entire movie is barely 45 seconds long, this straightforward slapstick scene could be the precursor to all later comedic movies. The boy is changed to a teenager in the 1896 film adaptation, and the spanking action is replaced with a kick to the buttocks.

The gardener was played by Louis Lumière's own gardener, François Clerc. A young apprentice carpenter from the Lumière workshop, who is sometimes identified as Daniel Duval and Benoît Duval (born 1881), was employed by Lumière for the mischievous kid. However, Leon Trotobas appears to have been the first boy to portray the part in La Ciotat.

The Waterer Watered and The Sprinkler Sprinkled are two other names for L'Arroseur Arrosé, a short black-and-white silent comedy film from 1895 that was directed and produced by Louis Lumière and starred François Clerc and Benoît Duval. The first screening took place on June 10, 1895.

It is the first known example of film comedy, the first time a fictional plot was depicted on screen, and the first time a promotional film poster was used. Originally titled Le Jardinier ("The Gardener") or Le Jardinier et le petit espiègle ("The Gardener and the Little Mischievous"), the movie is also known in English as The Sprinkler Sprinkled and The Tables Turned on the Gardener.

On June 10, 1895, during a multi-day meeting of the French Photographers' Association in Lyon, Louis and Auguste Lumière showcased a number of their films in a bigger environment, marking the first screening of L'Arroseur arrosé. Members of photographic and scientific societies attended several private showing of the Lumière pictures in the ensuing months, the first of which took place in Belgium in November 1895. One of the movies shown at nearly every screening was L'Arroseur Arrosé, which at the time was still marketed under the title Le Jardinier (The Gardener). The Cinématographe attracted a lot of attention once these incidents were reported in trade journals.

The L'Arroseur Arrosé poster holds the distinction of being the first poster created specifically to advertise a single movie. Even though posters have been used to promote cinematic projection presentations since 1890, early posters usually focused on highlighting the technological innovation of these shows and discussing the caliber of the recordings. Marcellin Auzolle's poster for L'Arroseur shows a crowd laughing in the foreground as the movie is projected onto a screen in the backdrop. It is also the first movie poster to show a real-life scenario from a movie, showing the gardener getting splashed in the face.

It was usual for rival filmmakers to reshoot a popular film short and for distributors to replicate a film print to present as their own because copyright law was neither enforced nor yet well defined for the developing art of filmmaking. Due to these methods, L'Arroseur Arrosé was reproduced multiple times and published under various titles in France and the US, including a remake by the Lumières themselves. While Georges Méliès filmed one remake, L'Arroseur, in 1896, little is known about the majority of these replicas. The Biter Bit was published in Britain in 1899. Later, in his 1958 film Les Mistons, French New Wave director François Truffaut paid tribute to the joke. The Soviet comedy western "A Man from the Boulevard des Capucines" contains parts of the movie. A similar joke can be found in the Bi Gan movie "Resurrection" from 2025, which also had the full movie shown in the background of a scene.

This short video can be downloaded for free from the Internet due to its antiquity. Additionally, it has been included in several film compilations, such as Landmarks of Early Film Volume 1.

The French phrase "l'arroseur arrosé" has come to signify "the biter bit," "a taste of one's own medicine," or "hoist with his own petard"—that is, when someone who is used to mistreating, defeating, or humiliating others gets the same treatment.

The 1895 short film L'arroseur arrosé (also known as The Waterer Watered or The Sprinkler Sprinkled) by Louis Lumière is a foundational milestone in cinema history due to several pioneering achievements: 

First Narrative Fiction Film: It is widely considered the first film to tell a fictional story rather than merely recording mundane reality, such as people leaving a factory or a train arriving at a station.

First Film Comedy: It established comedy as a viable cinematic genre, specifically introducing slapstick humor through its practical joke premise.

First Staged Performance: Unlike the Lumière brothers' usual "actuality" films (documentaries), this was a pre-planned, scripted scenario featuring actors—specifically François Clerc as the gardener and Benoît Duval as the mischievous boy.

First Use of a Promotional Movie Poster: The film's advertisement, illustrated by Marcellin Auzolle, is the first known poster designed to promote an individual film and the first to depict an actual scene from the movie.

Introduction of Narrative Structure: despite its 45-second runtime, it pioneered a clear story arc with a beginning, middle, and end, including the setup of a prank, the climax (the gardener getting sprayed), and the resolution (the boy being caught and punished).

The film's impact was so significant that it was remade by Lumière himself in 1896 and copied or paid homage to by other cinema pioneers like Georges Méliès and later François Truffaut.