... the gag!
The Lumiere brothers didn't just invent cinema, an art without which IMDb wouldn't exist, they reinvented the gag, an art (yes, an art) without which the French expression "Sprinkler Sprinkled" wouldn't exist, not to mention... cinematic comedy, you know... Chaplin, Keaton, Lewis, Carrey etc... if laughter could be counted in royalties, well, there's always a little cent owed to that seminal piece of celluloid from 1895.
The joke is as old as the Lascaux paintings: a man is watering his garden, a naughty boy steps on the hose and... I won't spoil the ending, I know what goes after is a joke even someone with a QI lower than his shoe size would guess. Still, it works. And we laugh. You know what? Because the essence on the joke doesn't lie on its premise but on the anticipation, the second of the three-act structure. Set-up. Anticipation. Punch-line.
We know the punch-line, which weakens the comedic effect a bit, but we enjoy it nonetheless because the anticipation prepared us for the laugh, if the predictable outcome happens, we're happy because it satisfies our intellect somewhat, comedy appeals in an intellectual way you know... of course the gag doesn't reinvent the wheel but how can you get a twist on that story anyway?
So, what we've got here is the shortest but the most primitive comedy ever, a short intended to make its targeted people laugh, maybe we grew too sophisticated not to appreciate that kind of humor but I dare even the most skeptical one not to let a little chuckle slip. Sure, this is no Chaplin or Keaton but this is comedy in its rawest form and the Lumière brothers got it right, all you've got to do is toy with your audience's anticipation, whatever will happen will happen and will make them laugh...
There's no need to get over-analytical in a ''sprinkler-sprinkled' short, let's just say the film has one merit: it proved that the silver screen needed to provide one emotion and the most universal one, the one that could work with that initial format: laughter, and that it happened so shortly after the first film ever proves how essential comedy was to a Boeotian audience.
It's one thing to show a train arriving or workers going for lunch, but a comedy has one edge over any filmed stuff: it tells a story.
Set-up, anticipation/ action, punch-line, maybe in this simple trilogy, you've got the seeds that planted the art of storytelling, comedy as the essence of film-making. One of the reasons Chaplin is the most emblematic figure of cinema is that three out of the four pillars that made the foundations of cinema is comedy, and "The Sprinkler Sprinkled" constitutes the birth of the visual gag.
The film might even be the first to have an official "villain" even if it's a little prankster and he gets his comeuppance in the end, so even this limited range of plot points, there's an Aesop after all.
Simple but essential...
(a short review maybe, but what did you expect for a 30-second short?)
The Lumiere brothers didn't just invent cinema, an art without which IMDb wouldn't exist, they reinvented the gag, an art (yes, an art) without which the French expression "Sprinkler Sprinkled" wouldn't exist, not to mention... cinematic comedy, you know... Chaplin, Keaton, Lewis, Carrey etc... if laughter could be counted in royalties, well, there's always a little cent owed to that seminal piece of celluloid from 1895.
The joke is as old as the Lascaux paintings: a man is watering his garden, a naughty boy steps on the hose and... I won't spoil the ending, I know what goes after is a joke even someone with a QI lower than his shoe size would guess. Still, it works. And we laugh. You know what? Because the essence on the joke doesn't lie on its premise but on the anticipation, the second of the three-act structure. Set-up. Anticipation. Punch-line.
We know the punch-line, which weakens the comedic effect a bit, but we enjoy it nonetheless because the anticipation prepared us for the laugh, if the predictable outcome happens, we're happy because it satisfies our intellect somewhat, comedy appeals in an intellectual way you know... of course the gag doesn't reinvent the wheel but how can you get a twist on that story anyway?
So, what we've got here is the shortest but the most primitive comedy ever, a short intended to make its targeted people laugh, maybe we grew too sophisticated not to appreciate that kind of humor but I dare even the most skeptical one not to let a little chuckle slip. Sure, this is no Chaplin or Keaton but this is comedy in its rawest form and the Lumière brothers got it right, all you've got to do is toy with your audience's anticipation, whatever will happen will happen and will make them laugh...
There's no need to get over-analytical in a ''sprinkler-sprinkled' short, let's just say the film has one merit: it proved that the silver screen needed to provide one emotion and the most universal one, the one that could work with that initial format: laughter, and that it happened so shortly after the first film ever proves how essential comedy was to a Boeotian audience.
It's one thing to show a train arriving or workers going for lunch, but a comedy has one edge over any filmed stuff: it tells a story.
Set-up, anticipation/ action, punch-line, maybe in this simple trilogy, you've got the seeds that planted the art of storytelling, comedy as the essence of film-making. One of the reasons Chaplin is the most emblematic figure of cinema is that three out of the four pillars that made the foundations of cinema is comedy, and "The Sprinkler Sprinkled" constitutes the birth of the visual gag.
The film might even be the first to have an official "villain" even if it's a little prankster and he gets his comeuppance in the end, so even this limited range of plot points, there's an Aesop after all.
Simple but essential...
(a short review maybe, but what did you expect for a 30-second short?)