Library of Congress finds cinema's previously lost "first robot"

Featuring Méliès himself as an impresario who finds himself at odds with his own artificial person (played by a variety of currently uncredited actors), the film has long been considered both lost, and a landmark of very early science fiction film. (Méliès, who was a showman and stage magician before falling into the world of filmmaking, was a collector of automata in his own right.) The “plot,” such as it is, is a very short, very slapstick take on The Terminator, as a man’s hubris (turning a crank to make an artificial person move) begets conflict (the robot starts hitting him in the head with a stick) that ends in destruction (the man hitting the robot with a comically large hammer until it shrinks into nothing). So, yeah, not exactly Ex Machina over here—but it’s an interesting example of an artificial human character on film, more than 20 years before Karel Čapek first coined the word “robot.”

Per the Library’s blog, the film was found in the whimsically named “Frisbee Collection,” named after William Delisle Frisbee, a Pennsylvania potato farmer and teacher who moonlighted as an early cinema pioneer, traveling around small towns with a projector to show the nascent technology off. Frisbee left his films to his descendants, who eventually handed the aging nitrate film stock over to the Library, who discovered a copy of the lost “Gugusse” in the trove. The 45-second film has now been restored and placed online; you can view it at the Library’s site here.