L'Arroseur Arrosse

Everyone has seen stills, what we would now call "screen shots," from the Lumiere brother's tiny "actualitie" cinematographed one sunny afternoon in Lyon in 1895. Still images generally show the gardener peering into the nozzle of his watering hose while a mischievious boy stands nearby, apparently five or six feet adjacent to him, crimping the hose by standing on it. In fact, the little movie looks different than you expect when you see the thing in motion -- I suppose this is true of anything, but the effect with respect to this film is startling. Initially, we see only the gardener. The images are silvery and have the intensely deep, objective focus of old movies. Somewhere behind the gardener and to his right a little fountain of water splashes upward into the air, droplets catching the glint of the bright sunshine. This little spray seems designed to show us where the hose is lying in the grass. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to perceive the course or run of the hose in the image -- and the location of the hose, of course, is crucial to the gag we are about to see. In Roland Barthes' terms, the little flare of water spurting up from a place where either the hose is pierced or a connection is loose is a "punctum" -- that is, a point of interest that seems gratuitous, a guarantor of the truth of the image by reason of incorporating a detail that, at first, seems wholly continguent, opportunistic, something filmed simply because it happened to occupy the frame of vision encompassed by the lens interacting with the film clawed through the device. But, in fact, this "punctum" as I have suggested seems carefully positioned to assist us in understanding the geometry of the gag -- the boy crimping the hose only to release the stricture so that the gardener will spray himself in the face. The young man appears suddenly and seems to dance more than walk to the place a little behind the gardener where he will crimp the hose. Most still images taken from the film show the boy on a plane apparently beside the gardener, begging the question as to how the gardener is unaware of the young man about to perpetrate his prank. The moving image, however, shows the boy's approach, both matter-of-fact, and stealthy, and, for some reason, when you see the figure in motion it seems much more plausible that the gardener would be unaware of the prankster's somewhat spectral appearance beside him. Stills make a film's image seem perpetual, an array of spatial relationships frozen in place -- but in the moving picture, we see that the boy's approach is swift, his presence next to the gardener ephemeral, an affair that takes only five or six seconds. When the gardener sprays himself in the face, he, then, turns the hose toward his tormentor, but the boy darts away. Images proceed like a torrent. The spray is directed toward our eyes. The effect is equivalent to the image in "The Great Train Robbery" (1903) when the outlaw, beautifully handtinted turns his six-guns on the camera and materializing the notion of the "shot" fires directly at the lens, little orangish and scarlet explosions decorating the frame. The sun on the spray of water is very beautiful and equates to the light that has been diverted, as if through a hose crimped and, then, released and crimped again -- in later cameras at the rate of 24 times a second -- to create a flow of images directed into our eyes. (Apparently, L'Arroseur Arrosse was remade several times. Some versions of the film available on You-tube are strictly linear, the boy approaching from the right parallel to the plane of the hose's spray. In this, later, version, the hose is clearly visible as a vector of energy across the bottom of the frame and the "punctum" of the rupture is not necessary to show the course of the hose. The garden in this version is clearly a different place than the location where the first iteration of the picture was made, a tighter, more circumscribed space. Both films are more punitive than I recalled after first watching -- at least, half the running time of each picture is devoted to the gardener chasing down the boy, who runs diagonally away from the camera and to the left, seizing him, dragging him toward the lens, and, then, slapping his buttocks briefly and ineffectually. In the first version, the gardener turns the hose on the boy, but not in the remake.) These two films (and, perhaps, there are many versions -- Truffaut reprised the gag in the late fifties in "Le Miston) were made after Lumiere shot the famous footage of the train pulling into the station and an image of his factory workers swarming through a gate at the end of their shift. The film of the factory workers is particularly beautiful and mysterious -- almost all of the workers are women who appear to be neatly, almost formally, dressed. They emerge from the gate of the factory and divide into two streams, one flowing to the right and one to the left -- no one comes straight toward the camera suggesting that Lumiere is filming from atop a wall or some other kind of obstruction. The motion of the women dividing into equal regiments moving right and left is almost balletic. The women are "whistle-splitters" anxious to get home to the families and they move very briskly ahead of some men, also dressed rather elegantly in what appear to be leather vests. The men amble out of the factory. In the pack of women, we find embedded a boy teetering on a spidery-looking bicycle and a big dog -- this detail is the "punctum" that animates this film and gives it an aura of the marvelous. The Lumiere cinematograph apparatus is capable of making only a very short film -- these movies are 49 seconds long.