if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

and I have seen The Charlie Chaplin shorts, Electrocuting an Elephant and The Execution of Mary Queen Of Scots This has a too thin plot line to keep anyone's attention even for a second of this movie the worst short film ever is Electrocuting an Elephant This is about some kid stepping on a gardener's hose he checks to see what stopped the water flowing he steps off it and he doesn't run away from him in the right direction he was supposed to run so the Gardener couldn't see the kid but he had to run away so the Gardener can see the kid and he punishes him for a while. How can anyone like this crap and I have seen Disaster Movie. All in all where's that 1 minute

I had read descriptions of this movie at least 20 years before I first saw it; inevitably, the movie is a disappointment. Actually, the Lumiere Brothers made at least two different versions of this movie, in different locations with different casts. Its title is usually given in English as 'Watering the Gardener'. This 1895 effort is the earlier version.SPOILERS COMING. A gardener is using a hosepipe to water the garden. A boy sneaks up behind him and treads on the hose, shutting off the flow. The gardener, of course, peers directly into the empty nozzle to see what's wrong. Cue the boy to lift his foot, restoring the flow and soaking the gardener. Spotting the fleeing boy, the gardener catches him and spanks him.This movie is often cited as the very first film comedy, and it surely qualifies as one of the very earliest. When I'd first read about it, I visualised the boy as being about seven or eight years old at most. In this film (both versions I've seen), he's clearly at least twelve: really too old to be engaged in this sort of mischief ... and spanking a boy of that age is not so much punitive as something else altogether.I was vaguely intrigued that the hosepipe in this movie is made of some material which causes it to kink into sections rather than flex uniformly. Gutta-percha, perhaps?The Lumiere brothers' very earliest movies were simply filmed events: documentary footage. Although this movie's action has clearly been staged for the camera, it's still historically significant as an early attempt to tell a story in the cinema medium rather than merely record events. For that reason, I'll rate this crude soaker 10 out of 10.

I watched this film on a DVD that was rammed with short films from the period. I didn't watch all of them as the main problem with these type of things that their value is more in their historical novelty value rather than entertainment. So to watch them you do need to be put in the correct context so that you can keep this in mind and not watch it with modern eyes. With the Primitives & Pioneers DVD collection though you get nothing to help you out, literally the films are played one after the other (the main menu option is "play all") for several hours. With this it is hard to understand their relevance and as an educational tool it falls down as it leaves the viewer to fend for themselves, which I'm sure is fine for some viewers but certainly not the majority. What it means is that the DVD saves you searching the web for the films individually by putting them all in one place – but that's about it.Anyway onto this film which features a famous gag that you'll still find variations of being done today. Of course the downside of this is that seeing a man looking down a hose only to be squirted with water is not actually that funny. Or at least it isn't when it is done with such so-so awareness of comedy and the importance of timing and acting. It doesn't help either that we have an extended scene of the prankster in question being remonstrated with by the gardener, not the funniest of things. However of course one must always remember that this was a very early example of this joke being used on the screen so for that alone it should be looked at. Just don't expect anything in the delivery to make you laugh though.

On December 28, 1895, thirty-three people were witnesses of history being written as the very first audience of the Lumières' Cinématographe, an innovative device that was able to project motion pictures on a screen. Motion pictures were not new for the people gathered on at Paris's Salon Indien Du Grand Café that day, as Edison's Kinetoscope (the "Peep Show") was a popular form of entertainment; however, nobody in the room was prepared to see the images projected on the screen to move as unlike the Kinetoscope, the Cinématographe allowed the movies to be seen by an audience. 10 short films shot by August and Louis Lumière were shown that historic day, most of them depicting everyday scenes like people walking out of the Lumière factory or playing cards, but one among those 10 short films was different: "L' Arroseur Arrosé", the first comedy film."L' Arroseur Arrosé", literally ("The Sprinkler Sprinkled"), is basically about a practical joke committed by a mischievous boy (Benoît Duval) to annoy a Gardener (François Clerc) who is working with his plants in Lyons. The movie begins with the Gardener watering his vegetables when the boy steps on the hose he is using to water the plants. The Gardener is surprised as the water stops flowing so he inspects the nozzle to find out what's happening. As he checks it, the boy releases the hose and the water continues flowing, spraying the gardener as it comes out of the hose with strength. Surprised by this, the Gardener quickly realizes that he's been tricked, but the boy responsible escapes running away in order to avoid being caught. The Gardener decides to chase the boy in order to punish him for his actions.When compared to the other 9 movies shown on that first screening, "L' Arroseur Arrosé" always stand out as it was remarkably different from any of the other movies in the sense that it wasn't an "actuality film", but the very first staged fictional comedy shot on film. The Lumière brothers had a preference for documentaries (actuality films) as they weren't really interested in other uses for their invention besides the scientific documentation of real life events; so it is because of this reason that the creation of "L' Arroseur Arrosé" is truly a real oddity among Lumières' movies. Anyways, not only is this movie special for those reasons, it is also one of the best looking of the 10 (and one that has survived almost intact to this date), with the brothers showing a great early use of cinematography to frame the film.In its barely 50 seconds of duration, "L' Arroseur Arrosé", opened the way to slapstick and pantomime in film, as the movie showed that it was possible to use the new invention to make pure entertainment, and that there was an extremely high unused potential in the Cinématographe. It wouldn't be too far of a stretch to claim that comedy films were born in this movie. While the reasons behind the inclusion of this film among 9 documentaries is odd, it was quite probably that this was the film that inspired a notable member of that first audience to make fictional movies aimed to entertain: Georges Méliès, who would later become a famous filmmaker on his own (and would direct a remake of this very film too). 9/10