A battered old trunk in a Michigan garage has given up a rare piece of film history.
A long-lost film by Georges Méliès, the French pioneer of early cinema, has been found in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and donated to the U.S. Library of Congress, which has now digitized the clip.
For the past two decades, Bill McFarland had looked after a century-old trunk that originally belonged to his great-grandfather, an itinerant showman who brought the world’s first moving pictures to communities in rural western Pennsylvania.
Inside were 10 films. McFarland tried and failed to place them with museums and antique stores, which were wary of holding highly combustible nitrate reels. He eventually donated the films to the Library of Congress in Virginia, driving roughly 700 miles across the country to do so.
At the library, specialist technicians quickly identified the middle of one of the reels as the work of Méliès’s Star Film company, based on a black star painted in the center of the screen.
After examining the 45-second film frame by frame, and working through sections that were crumbled in places and stuck together in others, they identified it as Gugusse and the Automaton, a c. 1897 creation that had not been seen in more than a century.
The one-shot, one-reel film presents the first known moving image of a robot and tells the story of an inventor struggling to control his machine.
Gugusse begins with a magician, played by Méliès, standing in a workshop and winding up his automaton clown. The clown soon attacks the magician with a walking stick. The magician then retaliates by grabbing a sledgehammer and pounding the automaton until it disappears.
Méliès was drawn to film after attending the world’s first public screening by the Lumières Brothers in Paris in 1895. A theatrical showman and magician by trade, he went on to make more than 500 films and helped develop techniques including double exposure and jump cuts.
He also made some of early cinema’s most iconic films, including A Trip to the Moon from 1902.
By World War I, however, Méliès was beginning to go out of fashion. Some of his negatives were melted down for silver and celluloid and used in the war effort.
His popularity before the war also led to widespread pirating. Today, roughly 300 Méliès films survive. The National Audio-Visual Conservation Center has around 60 in its refrigerated vault, which is designed to prevent nitrate fires.
McFarland’s trunk held more than one Méliès title. It also contained The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match from 1900, along with fragments of an early Thomas Edison film titled The Burning Stable from 1896.
The Library of Congress has digitized Gugusse and made it available to view.
“The moment we set our eyes on this box of film,” George Willeman, the Library’s vault leader, said in a statement. “We knew it was something special.”
📸 Credit:
