A piece of techno-cinematic history has emerged as the US Library of Congress releases the restored video of the oldest film to feature a "robot." Dating from 1897, the silent film Gugusse et l'Automate by George Méliès was thought lost until recently.
Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès is regarded today as one of the great pioneers of cinema, introducing many innovations that now form the basic toolkit of moviemaking.
Where other filmmakers contented themselves with films that consisted of nothing but trains coming into stations or people walking in the street, Méliès hit on the idea of "artificially arranged scenes." That is, arranging scenes to create a connected narrative story. He was also one of the first to create what we'd now call special effects films.
This began in 1896 when his camera jammed while filming at the Place de l'Opéra in Paris, resulting in a bus "changing" into a hearse. He began exploring how to exploit this technique, mixing it with all manner of stage magic and illusions. To this he added camera tricks like double exposure, dissolves, hand coloring, and matte shots, which is particularly impressive when you realize that he had to achieve most of his effects inside the camera before the film was developed.
The result was a string of classics like Le Manoir du Diable, Cendrillon, Le Voyage à travers l'impossible, and Le Voyage dans la Lune. Unfortunately, in those days films were regarded as ephemera to be exhibited for one run and then forgotten. The result was a depressing number of works that have vanished for all time.
One of these was thought to be Gugusse et l'Automate. For over a century, it was believed to be lost, but in 2025 a deteriorating copy on 10 rusted reels of nitrate stock was found in the Library of Congress's William DeLyle Frisbee Collection in Culpeper, Virginia. The reels had previously lain in basements and garages for decades before being donated by Bill McFarland of Michigan.
Once this remarkable find was identified, the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center undertook restoration by stabilizing and scanning the brittle, crumbling stock.
Running less than a minute, the plot of Gugusse et l'Automate is fairly simple. A clown named Gugusse shows off an automaton in the form of a small boy. As Gugusse turns a crank, the automaton waves a stick about. Suddenly, the figure becomes large and repeats its waving. Finally, it grows to the size of a large man and starts hitting Gugusse on the head, either deliberately or by accident. Enraged, Gugusse hurls the figure down and bashes it on the head with an enormous clown hammer. The figure grows smaller with each blow until it turns into a puppet, which Gugusse destroys with a final whack.
Okay, it's not exactly Terminator 2, but what can you expect for 1897? Grab some popcorn and check it out below:
Source: Library of Congress
