A 45-second reel pulled from a Michigan trunk has brought a forgotten Georges Méliès film back into view
A long-lost film by French filmmaker and magician Georges Méliès (1861–1938) has resurfaced after being donated to the U.S. Library of Congress, where specialists identified it as “Gugusse and the Automaton,” a c. 1897 short that had not been seen in more than a century. The discovery adds a rare surviving example to the fragile body of Méliès’s work and offers an early glimpse of one of cinema’s most enduring themes: the uneasy relationship between creator and machine.
The reel was among 10 films that Bill McFarland, a collector in Grand Rapids, Michigan, had tried to place with museums and antique stores before sending the box to the Library of Congress. Once technicians examined the damaged footage frame by frame, they noticed a black star painted at the center of the reel — a mark associated with Méliès’s Star Film company. That detail led to the identification of the film, which runs just 45 seconds and is now believed to be the first known moving image of a robot.
In the film, Méliès appears as a magician in a workshop, winding up an automaton clown. The machine soon turns on him, attacking with a walking stick, before the magician answers with a sledgehammer and forces it into submission. The comic premise feels strikingly current, even as the film’s handmade effects belong to the earliest years of cinema.
Méliès was drawn to film after attending the Lumières Brothers’ first public screening in Paris in 1895. A stage magician by trade, he went on to make more than 500 films and helped pioneer techniques including double exposure and jump cuts. By World War I, however, his reputation had faded, and some of his negatives were melted down for silver and celluloid for the war effort. Piracy also spread his work widely, though only about 300 Méliès films are thought to survive today.
McFarland’s trunk also contained “The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match” (1900) and fragments of Thomas Edison’s “The Burning Stable” (1896). The Library of Congress has digitized “Gugusse and the Automaton,” making the rediscovered film available to view — a small but significant recovery from cinema’s earliest, most vulnerable era.
