The Biter Bit

The Biter Bit is an 1899 British short black-and-white silent comedy film, produced by the Bamforth Company, featuring a boy playing a practical joke on a gardener by grasping his hose to stop the water flow and then letting go again when the gardener looks down it to check. The film, "is an English remake," of Auguste and Louis Lumière's L'Arroseur Arrosé (1895), according to Michael Brooke of BFI Screenonline, "providing a good illustration of how early film production companies cheerfully plagiarised each other's work," with, "a few minor differences between, most notably a rather greater sense of space and depth in the Bamforth version," and "three distinct planes to the action." It is included in the BFI DVD Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers and a clip is featured in Paul Merton's interactive guide to early British silent comedy How They Laughed on the BFI website.