A long-lost film by Georges Méliès, the French pioneer of early cinema, has been discovered in a garage in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
For the past two decades, Bill McFarland has looked after a century-old trunk that originally belonged to his great-grandfather, an itinerant showman who brought the world’s first moving pictures to communities in rural western Pennsylvania. After trying and failing to place the box of 10 films with museums and antique stores (who were wary of holding highly combustible nitrate reels), McFarland donated them to the U.S. Library of Congress in Virginia, driving roughly 700 miles across the country to do so.
Footage from of Georges Méliès’s 1897 French short silent film. Photo: Kent Nishimura / AFP / Getty Images.
There, specialist technicians quickly identified the middle of one of the reels as the work of Méliès’s Star Film company, based on a black star painted in the center of the screen. After looking through the 45-second film frame-by-frame, which was crumbled in places and stuck together in others, it became clear they had uncovered Gugusse and the Automaton, a c. 1897 creation that had not been seen in more than a century.
The one-shot, one-reel film presents the first known moving image of a robot and tells a story that remains pertinent today: an inventor’s struggle to control his ingenious machine. Gugusse begins with a magician (played by Méliès) stood in a workshop winding up his automaton clown. Soon, the clown is attacking the magician with his walking stick. In retaliation, the magician grabs a sledgehammer and pounds his automaton into submission until it disappears. If only conquering A.I. was as straightforward.
A portrait of Georges Méliès in 1893. Photo: APIC/Getty Images.
Méliès was drawn to the new medium of film after attending the world’s first public screening by the Lumières Brothers in Paris in 1895. A theatrical showman and magician by trade, Méliès would make more than 500 films, helping to develop revolutionary techniques such as double exposure and jump cuts. Though he created some of early cinema’s most iconic films, including A Trip to the Moon (1902), by World War I he was beginning to go out of fashion.
As a consequence, some of his negatives were melted down for silver and celluloid and used in the war effort. His prewar popularity, however, led to widespread pirating and today roughly 300 Méliès films endure—the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center has around 60 in its refrigerated vault which is designed to prevent nitrate fires.
Georges Melies’s Gugusse et l’Automate plays on a screen the Library of Congress’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center. Photo: Kent Nishimura/ AFP/Getty Images.
McFarland’s trunk also contained another Méliès film, The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match (1900), as well as fragments of an early Thomas Edison film titled The Burning Stable (1896). The Library of Congress has digitized Gugusse and made it available to view.
“The moment we set our eyes on this box of film,” George Willeman, the Library’s vault leader, said in a statement. “We knew it was something special.”