A Rare 1897 Film Discovered in an Old Trunk in Michigan Features the First On-Screen Appearance of a Robot
Filmmaker Georges Méliès employed some of his signature special effects techniques to create comedy in “Gugusse and the Automaton”
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In a battered trunk full of his great-grandfather’s nitrate film rolls, a Michigan man discovered a relic of filmmaking history: a copy of “Gugusse and the Automaton,” a long-lost 45-second film by French auteur Georges Méliès, a pioneer of early cinema.
The slapstick short film, created around 1897, was famous for containing the very first on-screen appearance of a robot—preceding the term itself by more than two decades. But no watchable copies of the film were known to survive.
Last fall, however, retired teacher Bill McFarland of Grand Rapids brought his great-grandfather’s collection to the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Center.
“It was just this trunk of films that seemed too good to throw away,” McFarland tells Agence France-Presse (AFP). “But I had no idea what they were or how to show them.”
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In the conservation center’s nitrate film vault, archive technician Courtney Holschuh and vault leader George Willeman unraveled and examined the trunk. According to a Library of Congress blog post, the box held about ten reels of aged film, some rusted, misshapen, crumbled or stuck together.
One film shows a magician interacting with a mechanized humanoid named Pierrot Automate, which stands atop a pedestal decorated with a black star. Willeman recognized the magician as Méliès, who commonly starred in his own films, Holschuh says in an Instagram video shared by the library. Willeman reached out to his friend, a Méliès expert, for confirmation.
“Within the day, he got back [to me] and said, ‘You have a lost Méliès film! ‘Gugusse and the Automaton,’” Willeman says in the video.
Born in Paris in 1861, Méliès began his entertainment career as a stage magician. In 1895, he saw the short films of Auguste and Louis Lumière, the French brothers who’d invented the Cinématographe camera and projector, and he started experimenting with the new medium.
By the late 19th century, Méliès was employing never-before-seen techniques to create illusions on film—a practice that would earn him the moniker “cinemagician.” In “The Vanishing Lady,” for example, Méliès made his assistant disappear and reappear using a stop-motion technique. He employed the same device in “Gugusse and the Automaton”: When the magician character hits the robot over the head with a mallet, it magically shrinks.
“It’s mind-blowing to see how Méliès executed his ideas with the few tools available,” Robert Legato, the visual effects supervisor behind movies like Titanic and Hugo, told Variety’s Elsa Keslassy in 2011. “What Méliès did in 1902 with ‘[A] Trip to the Moon,’ without copying anyone, has inspired a lot of people’s work.”
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Did you know? Recycling film
During World War I, the negatives for many of Méliès’ films were melted down for silver and celluloid.
The special effects that Méliès employed in “A Trip to the Moon” included multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, forced-frame perspectives and dissolves. The short film, like other Méliès works, featured surreal sets and action inspired by science fiction. Per the Library of Congress, a still from the film of a rocket lodged in the eye of the moon’s face “became the image representing early cinema.”
“He was one of the first filmmakers,” Willeman tells AFP. “And one of the first to experience film piracy.”
Indeed, Méliès’ more than 500 films became very popular, and they were widely copied without his permission. The newly discovered version of “Gugusse and the Automaton” is actually a copy several times removed from the original.
The reel’s owner, McFarland’s great-grandfather, was William Delisle Frisbee, a Pennsylvania potato farmer and schoolteacher. Frisbee’s third gig? Traveling projectionist. He crisscrossed his state in a horse-drawn buggy—toting films, slides, a projector and a phonograph—and put on screenings in local churches, schoolhouses and auditoriums. Frisbee recorded his efforts in diaries, writing of packed houses and rowdy audiences.
“They must have been thrilled,” McFarland says in the blog post. “They must have been out of their minds to see this motion picture and to hear the Edison phonograph.”
After Frisbee died in 1937, two small trunks containing his projectors, films, diaries and papers were passed down through the family. His collection also contained copies of another Méliès film, “The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match” (1900), and fragments of Thomas Edison’s 1896 film “The Burning Stable.”
The librarians spent more than a week scanning and digitizing Frisbee’s copy of “Gugusse and the Automaton.” It’s now available to view online in 4K—as are many other reels from the nitrate film vault, thanks to recent efforts.
“Now we can make them available for everybody,” Willeman tells AFP, “which to me, being the film nerd I've been since third grade, is just amazing.”
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