Around 1897, the French director Georges Méliès made a silent short film that, until last month, hadn’t been publicly viewable for more than a century. “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, with “Gugusse et l’Automate” being a long-lost addition to his canon.
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” accompanied by music from a phonograph.
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.”
The collection also contained Méliès’ “The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match” and parts of Thomas Edison’s “The Burning Stable.” See more of conservators’ unraveling process on Instagram. (via Kottke)