This less than a minute early French film from the Gaumont company, "The Fisherman at the Stream", is essentially a reworking of the Lumiére film "The Sprayer Sprayed" (L'arroseur arrosé) (1895). In the Lumiére film, a prankster steps on a gardener's hose and then releases his foot once the gardener looks into the hose. It concludes with the gardener spanking the boy as punishment. In this Gaumont film, a boy pushes a fisherman into a stream. The fisherman, then, proceeds to hit the boy in retaliation. The boy has a couple friends with him, though, and the film concludes in a bit of a wrestling match, with the boys dunking the fisherman back into the water. All in a single stationary shot-scene, of course, as were all motion pictures then.
Thus, we have the same formula in both films, which are merely worked into different settings. There's the adult male enjoying recreation or light work – he then becomes the folly to a boy's prank – the "punitive ending", to use historian Noël Burch's phrasing. There are quite a few proto-story films made around the turn of the century that use this formula. Of those that I've seen or know about, some of the British ones seem to be the most inventive. R.W. Paul and G.A. Smith made so-called courtship comedies out of it, including Smith's "Hanging Out the Clothes" (1897). The ultimate version, however, must be Paul's "The Countryman and the Cinematograph" (1901), which uses the formula self-referentially to have a man attack his on-screen doppelgänger.
This film has been credited by some to Alice Guy, but Alison McMahan, who is the foremost academic authority on Guy, says in her book "Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema", that it was more likely filmed by a Gaumont laboratory worker or cameraman, or by Léon Gaumont himself. It was filmed in Barcelona, Spain. Guy did make a remake of "The Sprayer Sprayed" in 1898, though, as well as copies of other Lumiére scenes.
(Note: On the DVD, this particular film is recorded at an unnaturally fast rate; I don't know how faithful that was to the filmmakers' original intention or common practice of exhibitors.)
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