Around 1897, French director Georges Méliès made a short silent film that, until last month, had not been shown publicly in more than a century. “Gugusse et l’Automate” or “Gugusse and the Automate” is a 45-second slapstick film about a duel between a magician and a clown-style robot.
Méliès’s most famous work is the 1902 short film “A Voyage to the Moon,” which features an astronomer lowering a space capsule into the eye of the moon. The director’s work is widely regarded as the first in the realms of fantasy and science fiction, with “Gugs and Automations” being a long-lost addition to his canon.
The film resurfaced recently when Bill McFarland drove from his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to the library’s National Center for Audiovisual Preservation in Culpeper, Virginia, carrying a stack of scrolls that once belonged to his great-grandfather, William Delisle Frisbee. The collection was passed down through the family as part of Frisbee’s traveling career as a traveling showman, who packed up his horse and buggy in western Pennsylvania and traveled to nearby towns to show these early “moving pictures” to the musical accompaniment of a gramophone.
According to the library, MacFarlane’s copy of “Gugusse et l’Automate” “was at least three times the size of the original. Library technicians spent more than a week scanning it and stabilizing it into a digital format so that it can now be viewed by anyone online in 4K.”
The collection also contains portions of Méliès’s “The Wrestling Contest” and Thomas Edison’s “The Burning Stable.” See more of the protectors solving mysteries on Instagram. (via Kotek)
