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 around 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. It took a bit, but then the gasp of realization: They were looking at “Gugusse and the Automaton,” a long-lost film by the iconic French filmmaker George 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 had not been seen by anyone in likely more than a century. The find, made last September but now being announced publicly, 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. (Here’s how they did it.)
Equally delighted was Bill McFarland, the donor who had driven 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, but by night he was a traveling showman. He drove his horse and buggy from town to town to dazzle the locals with a projector and some of the world’s first moving pictures.
He set up shop in a local schoolroom, church, lodge or civic auditorium and showed magic lantern slides and short films with music from a newfangled phonograph. It was shocking.
“They must have been thrilled,” McFarland said. “They must have been out of their minds to see this motion picture and to hear the Edison phonograph.”
A Méliès film would have been an unforgettable experience to almost anyone in the 19th century.
A prominent French stage magician, he turned to filmmaking as soon as he saw the Lumière brothers’ world-first motion pictures in Paris in 1895. That a camera could rapidly project a series of still images on film and thus make them appear to move – “motion pictures” – was seen as a magic trick unto itself.
Méliès built his own camera and a glass studio (like a greenhouse) in Paris. He filmed ordinary scenes at first, but after accidentally discovering that a jump cut appeared on film as an astonishing transformation, he pioneered other tricks such as double exposure, black screens and forced perspective. All of these became staples of cinema. On screen, he could make a man appear to take off his head and flip it in the air, or a woman disappear, reappear and double.
He was also a devotee of the science fiction work of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and his films often featured surreal, fantastical sets and manic action. 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. It now plays at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His 1896 short, “Le Manoir du Diable,” is considered to be the world’s first horror film.
More than a century later, his lasting impact was exemplified in Martin Scorsese’s 2011 film “Hugo,” about a boy and an automaton in 1931 Paris. An elderly Méliès – by then, as in real life, a toy-shop owner largely forgotten by the world – appears as the boy’s soft-spoken savior.
“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. For centuries, inventors and engineers had made wind-up automatons – contraptions full of gears and levers with a shell that looked like a person – that could, as the gears unwound, do all sorts of things, even writing and drawing.
In “Gugusse,” the magician (Méliès), winds up an automaton dressed like the famous clown Pierrot, which is standing on a pedestal. Once wound up, the clown begins to beat the magician with his walking stick. The magician retaliates by getting a huge sledgehammer and bashing the automaton over the head, with 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 exhibition films also contained another well-known 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.
After Frisbee died in 1937, two small trunks of his old projectors and films, along with some of his diaries and papers, went to his daughter (McFarland’s grandmother), who passed them along to her son (McFarland’s dad), who passed them along to him.
McFarland didn’t know what was on the reels – they could no longer be safely run through a projector – and after years of searching for a home for them, a lab technician in Michigan suggested he contact the Library.
“The moment we set our eyes on this box of film, we knew it was something special,” said George Willeman, the Library’s nitrate film vault leader.
McFarland, relieved to have finally found a home for his family’s treasure chest, found it all fascinating, the films and the diaries of his wandering showman of a great-grandfather.
“He talks about full houses, and rowdy houses, and canceled shows, and he went all the way to the Pennsylvania-Maryland line, and I think into Ohio as well,” he said. “He made as much as $20 bucks a night, I see in his records, and sometimes he made $1.35 for the night, you know?”
It was, this deep dive into the old boxes and trunks in the attic, a magic trick known to researchers, historians and librarians – documents from another time drawing you back into a world gone by.
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Comments (34)
Thank you for this fascinating story and fir the film clip.
What a brilliant discovery! Thank you for this article which provides context and great background information.
yeah I believe so
Hello, much appreciated opportunity to view film along with article which made for great enjoyment.
Thanks again!
M. Amoroso
Ok this is beyond cool….but a correction. The movie Hugo is based on a book by Brian Selznick titled “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” that mixes alternating chapters of illustrations and words. Martin may have made it into a film, but Brian created it and captured the world Méliès created in film.
Hi there,
Thanks for writing! The article doesn’t address the origins of the “Hugo,” it just mentions Scorsese’s direction as a reference point. The book was amazing!
Best,
Neely
FantaSTIQUE!!!
THANK YOU ALL, especially the custodians of the bootlegged cultural treasures from yester yesteryear.
Gone is gone.
💫
It is such a treat to see an unknown Méliès film. Thanks for the restoration work and sharing it with the world so fast.
Will the piano music be fitting or overly-exaggerated?
So grateful that the film arrived at the Library of Congress and could be digitized for on-line viewing. Thanks are given to Mr. McFarland for taking the time to do some research on the films, and give them a proper home. He took the time to save them, driving all the way from Michigan. This is such great news for film buffs. I think it needs more media coverage because I almost missed the story. My hat is also off to all the employees at the Library of Congress for the care they take in preserving these films. I appreciate their efforts and received a tour of the film vaults about 8 years ago with a film preservation group. I was deeply impressed by what I saw.
Typo:
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Got it & tnx for the close read!
Wonderful! Thank you for publishing this work and for the work you do taking care of these treasures.
Thank you for sharing the film. What a brilliant discovery
Interesting how the “robot” gets larger as the creator builds it up in the beginning. Once it gets large enough, it turns on its creator, who is forced to destroy it. Isn’t this the core plot of The Terminator or The Matrix? Or maybe even a parable for the growth of AI?
Thank you for sharing this inspiring work of art. I have the thoughts that work like this may have inspired Charlie Chaplin in the transition from Vaudeville to theater.
This is so cool, thank you for what you do!
When I worked in film preservation in the ’90s and ’00s, it was very rarely that most preserved Méliès stuff would ever see the light of day, thanks to one of his descendants (either his granddaughter or great-granddaughter – I forget which, but she was simply known as Madame Méliès within the archive community) claiming copyright ownership of all his output and repeatedly threatening lawsuits. Again, I forget the exact details, but while it was likely that the copyright period had timed out, the possibility that her claim was valid was just significant enough that she had to be taken seriously. I would guess that the issue is now settled and/or that she passed away, hence there being no restriction on putting this latest find online.
As for the movie itself, thank goodness for continuous motion sprocketless scanners: duplicating that element by step contact printing with all those missing perforations would have been a challenge!
This is great!
With an interest & some work done in building a digitizing telecine for myself, and in old home movies, it’s really cool to hear about the Library of Congress’s preservation efforts!
Also the great tradition of worrying about and fighting robots in fiction & film makes this a fascinating & funny find. Go Gugusse!
There used to be this comic book Magnus, Robot Fighter 4000 A.D., to which this film will be an antecedent (he trained in a dojo to defend humanity against machines, then went out in a form-fitting gymnasium outfit and go-go boots kick clanker).
& it’s — kind of going to be a robot that draws that cellulose triacetate film past a light box & optics in this for-the-moment notional telecine– which for the moment is a hobbyist’s hand-waving here, saying “optics” — & manages the process.
They’re everywhere!
Meanwhile, that is an amazing story of this film’s journey to the Library, and great to hear about. Thank you for the article and for the good work of our preservationists!
Thanks to the Frisbee Family and their “hoarding” instinct we all get to see a little slice of 1897 ! Never let anyone declutter – the people you’ve preserved this for were not and have not been born yet ! Thanks for the new memories!
Beautiful film A warning from the past? We’re on the verge of monumental change. ‘Automotons’ will soon walk amongst us. I wonder if we too will take up the sledgehammer in the end.
Thank you for presenting this beautiful treasure to the world. A a film composer myself, I value everything that will further our understanding of the early days of this most sublime art form.
Is it Delisle (per the article) or DeLyle (per the video intro)?
Thank you for the opportunity to see this film!
Fascinating. Thank you. Find myself wondering if there is a parable pounded into this little film.
Joyous!
Thank you so much from France. I was very happy to see this little movie.
that’s amazing. Robots fighting back since 1897. Automaton will be back.
This is truly a wonderful find!
Isn’t the story actually that a couple from Michigan brought this film to a curator at LOC? How is it that the NPR story differs so dramatically from this LOC article???
Hi,
Thanks for writing! I’m not sure which NPR story you’re referring to, but a very fine Feb. 28 piece by Chloe Veltman uses the LOC story and video as a basis for her report. Her piece focused more on the robot aspect of the film, rather than just the discovery. And as our story explains, Bill McFarland (from Michigan) brought a small cache of mostly unidentified films to the Library. (People send films to our staff quite often, asking for help in one form or another. That isn’t unusual). They were in very rough shape. The LOC staff, in cleaning/preserving the films, identified that one was the long lost “Automaton” film, verified it, and thus the discovery.
All best,
Neely
I want to second what another commenter said about the Scorsese film being based on the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznik. Whatever the reason for failing to mention the origin of the story, it is misleading an inaccurate to credit Scorsese with the story that highlights Méliès’s accomplishments. It would not have taken many more words to acknowledge that Scorsese directed the film version of the award-winning book. It’s a bit disrespectful to the author—and to children’s literature, which is an important genre and in this case, art form.
Great job!!!!! George M has risen and speaks to us again. Once again, fantastic job!
What a fantastic find! My great grandmother was a stage actress and appeared in multiple Méliès movies (she’s one of the girl pushing the spaceship in the De la terre à la lune movie for example), and knew Madeleine Malthête-Méliès, George’s Granddaughter extremely well. She would have been thrilled to know that an additional movie has been found and can be enjoyed again by a new generation.
What a great story! Thanks for sharing.