A Long-Lost Film, Finally Found

The reels of film were old and battered, and no one knew what was on them.

They were from before World War I and had been shuttled from basements to barns to garages and had just been dropped off at the Library. There were about 10 of them, and they were rusted. Some were misshapen. The nitrate film stock had crumbled to bits on some; other strips were stuck together.

The librarians peeled them apart and gently looked them over, frame by frame.

And there, on one film, was a black star painted onto a pedestal in the center of the screen. The action was of a magician and a robot battling it out in slapstick fashion. After a moment, a gasp of realization: They were looking at “Gugusse and the Automaton,” a long-lost film by iconic French filmmaker Georges Méliès at his Star Film company.

The 45-second film, made around 1897, was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot, which had endeared it to generations of science fiction fans, even if they knew it only by reputation. It likely had not been seen by anyone in more than a century. The find, made last September and announced earlier this year, is a small but important addition to the legacy of world cinema and one of its founders.

“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 realize why you do this,” said Courtney Holschuh, the archive technician who unraveled the film.

Equally delighted was Bill McFarland, the donor who drove the box of films from his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, to have the cache evaluated.

His great-grandfather, William Delisle Frisbee, had been a potato farmer and schoolteacher in western Pennsylvania by day and a traveling showman by night. He drove his horse and buggy from town to town to dazzle the locals with some of the world’s first moving pictures.

A Méliès film would have been an unforgettable experience to almost anyone in the 19th century.

A prominent French stage magician, Méliès turned to filmmaking as soon as he saw the Lumière brothers’ world-first motion pictures in Paris in 1895. He built his own camera and a glass studio (like a greenhouse) in Paris. He pioneered filmmaking tricks such as double exposure, black screens and forced perspective. All of these became staples of cinema.

Méliès was a devotee of the science fiction work of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and his films often featured surreal, fantastical sets. An image from his most famous film, “A Trip to the Moon” — that of a rocket landing in the eye of the man on the moon — became the image representing early cinema. His 1896 short, “Le Manoir du Diable,” is considered the world’s first horror film.

“Gugusse,” for its part, is a one-shot, one-reel short filmed in front of a painted screen made to look like a workshop in which clocks and automatons were being made. In the film, the magician (Méliès) winds up an automaton dressed like the famous clown Pierrot. Once wound, the clown beats the magician with his walking stick. The magician retaliates by bashing the automaton over the head with a sledgehammer, each blow seeming to shrink it in half, until it is just a small doll. The magician then smashes it into the floor.

Méliès made more than 500 films but never progressed beyond his early technical achievements. The film world passed him by. In World War I, the negatives for most of his films were melted down for silver and celluloid, and he burned more himself after the war.

But because his work had once been so popular — and because of widespread pirating — duplicate copies remained, and today about 300 of his films are known to exist. The Library has about 60. The “Gugusse” print McFarland gave to the Library is a duplicate at least three times removed from the original.

Library technicians spent more than a week scanning and stabilizing it onto a digital format, so that it can now be seen by anyone online — in 4K, no less.

The cache of Frisbee’s films also contained another Méliès film from 1900, “The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match,” as well as fragments of an early Thomas Edison film, “The Burning Stable.” They survived due to McFarland and his family preserving them for a century, if often in haphazard circumstances.