Bande dessinée and the Cinematograph: Visual Narrative in 1895

Abstract

Abstract The Lumiere brothers' L'Arroseur arrose ['The Sprinkler Sprinkled'] of 1895 was probably the first staged fiction film to be shown in public, but also the first cinematic adaptation of a comic strip, previous treatments of the subject including an Imagerie Quantin broadsheet by Hermann Vogel, a cartoon by Christophe in Le Petit Francais Illustre and an illustrated sequence by Uzes in Le Chat Noir. What emerges from direct comparison is an appreciation of the sophisticated narrative devices that French comic illustrators employed by the 1880s, namely a dynamic combination of shot scales, angles and heights that still conforms to the diegetic demands of consistent spatial continuity. In short, these were the techniques that, perversely, would come to be known as 'cinematic'. In the basement of the Grand Cafe in the Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, on 28 December 1895, the Lumiere brothers gave the first commercial public exhibition of their Cinematographe. The twenty-minute programme was a mixed one: ten short films, mostly of documentary or actuality subjects, demonstrating the camera's ability to capture large public scenes and small domestic incidents alike. The audience - which included a deeply affected George Melies - paid a one-franc admission fee, indicating the commercial possibilities of the medium. As an early example of a public exhibition of projected moving pictures, and despite technical improvements, the event used the same fundamental arrangement and apparatus that would become standard throughout the coming century. Perhaps most significantly, the sixth short film on the programme, between Les Forgerons ['The Smiths'] (1895) and Le Repas de bebe ['Baby's Dinner'] (1895), was a simple, 46-second record of a practical joke, popularly called L'Arroseur arrose, widely regarded as one of the earliest staged film narratives and the world's first film comedy.1 Such a litany of 'firsts' doubtless contributes to the simplified teleological view of cinematic history as a single developmental timeline, beginning in Paris in 1895 and concluding as an unbroken thread in today's multiplexes. Yet, as John Fell and others have shown,2 early experiments in film narrative took place, not in a cinematic vacuum, but against a complex and vital background of varied and innovative visual media activity. New curiosities and traditional entertainments jostled against each other for the attention of an increasingly sophisticated and demanding public, and techniques, ideas and subject matter flowed rapidly and freely between the various media. Cinema and popular picture strips in the late nineteenth century, for instance, often featured strikingly similar characters, stories, jokes and narrative developments, were motivated by similar objectives - to hold the audience's attention, to interest and amuse - and were often similarly constrained by limited time or space, whether because of the length of a reel of film or the size of a magazine page. Famously, the Lumieres' first fiction film has a number of more or less well-known antecedents in contemporary bande dessinee, and therefore offers a unique opportunity to compare the treatment of the same material in different visual media in the very period that would mark the emergence of cinema as both an industry and an art form. There were three separate versions of the Lumieres' comedy film: the first shot by Louis Lumiere sometime between 22 March and 10 June 1895; the second between spring 1896 and 1 May 1897; and the third between summer 1896 and May 1897.3 Confusingly, all three versions were listed and sold as film 99 in the Catalogue Lumiere from the first edition of 1897, while a 1993 article by Claude Beylie appears to demonstrate that no Lumiere film was originally titled L'Arroseur arrose.4 Their first 'hosepipe' comedy, included in the 1895 Grand Cafe programme, was entitled Le Jardinier ['The Gardener'], but was swiftly renamed Le Jardinier et le petit espiegle ['The Gardener and the Little Urchin']. …