Lost for More Than a Century, the First 'Sci-Fi' Film Ever Made Resurfaces

""Gugusse et l'Automate," or "Gugusse and the Automaton," is a 45-second slapstick piece featuring a magician and a Pierrot-styled robot as they duke it out. Méliès is best known for "A Trip to the Moon," a short film from 1902 that famously features astromoners landing their capsule into the eye of the moon. The director's work is widely regarded as some of the first within fantasy and science fiction."

"This film resurfaced recently when Bill McFarland drove from his Grand Rapids, Michigan-home to the Library's National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, with a cache of reels that once belonged to his great-grandfather, William Delisle Frisbee. Passed down through the family, this collection was part of Frisbee's traveling showbusiness, in which he packed up his horse and buggy in western Pennsylvania and traveled to nearby towns to screen these early "moving pictures.""

"According to the library, McFarland's copy of "Gugusse et l'Automate" 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.""

Georges Méliès' 45-second silent film "Gugusse et l'Automate" from around 1897 has been recovered and made publicly viewable for the first time in over a century. The slapstick piece features a magician and robot in combat. Méliès is renowned for pioneering fantasy and science fiction cinema, most famously through "A Trip to the Moon." The film was discovered when Bill McFarland brought film reels from his great-grandfather William Delisle Frisbee's collection to the Library's National Audio-Visual Conservation Center. Frisbee operated a traveling exhibition business screening early moving pictures across western Pennsylvania. Library technicians spent over a week digitally scanning and stabilizing the film, which is a third-generation duplicate of the original. The restored film is now accessible online in 4K quality, alongside other recovered works including Méliès' "The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match" and Edison's "The Burning Stable."

Read at Colossal