PREVIEW

BY MARK WORGAN

A lost film by pioneering French filmmaker Georges Méliès has been discovered in the U.S. and restored.

Before it arrived at the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, “Gugusse and the Automaton”, a 45-second motion picture made around 1897, was just reels of rusted film.

Some had crumbled entirely, while others were fused together. Carefully separated and examined frame by frame, the degraded nitrate film revealed an unexpected image: a black star painted on a pedestal, and a slapstick battle between a magician and a robot.

It soon became clear the librarians were looking at “Gugusse and the Automaton”, a 45-second film made around 1897. The rediscovered work is believed to feature the first appearance of a robot in cinema - something that has long intrigued science fiction enthusiasts, despite the film itself being unseen for more than a century.

The discovery, made last September but only now announced publicly, adds a small yet significant piece to the early history of world cinema.

“This story is one that you see movies or television shows written about,” says Jason Evans Groth, curator of the Library’s moving image section.

“This is one of the collections that makes you realise why you do this,” said Courtney Holschuh, the archive technician who unravelled the film.

Equally pleased was Bill McFarland, who donated the reels after transporting them from his home in Grand Rapids to the Library’s conservation centre in Culpeper.

The films once belonged to his great-grandfather, William Delisle Frisbee, a schoolteacher and potato farmer in Pennsylvania who also travelled from town to town as an early showman. Using a horse and buggy, he brought some of the world’s first moving pictures to local audiences.

“They must have been thrilled,” McFarland said. “They must have been out of their minds to see this motion picture and to hear the Edison phonograph.”

Méliès himself was at the forefront of the new medium. Inspired after witnessing the first motion pictures by the Lumière brothers in Paris in 1895, he began experimenting with filmmaking techniques that would define early cinema.

Working from a glass studio he built himself, Méliès pioneered effects such as jump cuts, double exposure, and forced perspective. His films - often inspired by the works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells - combined fantasy, and science fiction.

His best-known work, A Trip to the Moon, features the iconic image of a rocket striking the moon’s eye, now regarded as a symbol of early cinema. Another film, Le Manoir du Diable, is widely considered the first horror film.

More than a century later, Méliès’ legacy was depicted in the film Hugo, directed by Martin Scorsese.

“Gugusse and the Automaton” itself is a simple, single-shot production set against a painted backdrop resembling a workshop. In it, Méliès plays a magician who winds up a clown-like automaton, only for it to turn on him. A comic struggle ensues, ending with the magician smashing the shrinking figure into the floor.

Despite producing more than 500 films, Méliès’ career declined as cinema evolved. During and after the First World War, many of his original negatives were destroyed, melted down for materials or burned by the filmmaker himself.
However, due to the popularity of his work and widespread duplication, around 300 of his films are still known to survive. The newly discovered print is itself several generations removed from the original.

After more than a week of careful restoration, the fragile footage has now been digitised in 4K, allowing it to be viewed online for the first time in over a century.

The collection also included another Méliès film, “The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match” (1900), and fragments of “The Burning Stable”, an early production by Thomas Edison.

For McFarland, whose family preserved the materials for decades, the discovery has been a revelation.

Reflecting on his great-grandfather’s travelling shows, McFarland added: “He talks about full houses, and rowdy houses, and cancelled shows, and he went all the way to the Pennsylvania-Maryland line, and I think into Ohio as well. He made as much as $20 bucks a night, I see in his records, and sometimes he made $1.35 for the night, you know?”

For historians and archivists, the find offers a rare glimpse into cinema's earliest days as a magical artform.