Gugusse and the Automaton

Wake up folks, a lost film from 1897 (!) was recently found again: 

In this special post earlier than usual for a weekday, I discuss the tremendous story behind this piece of lost media, which was recently revealed as having been found again. This 45-second short features director Georges Melies interacting w/ an automaton dressed as Pierrot the clown, using the trademark Melies camera tricks & editing. Whether or not this should be considered as “the first instance of a robot in cinema” or even “it was the first sci-fi movie” can be debated.

Instead, I’ll focus on how the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. acquired this on a film reel. They were donated a box of reels from a Bill McFarland in Michigan; his great-grandfather William Frisbee was a potato farmer and schoolteacher who was a showman at night who went around w/ a projector and another new device (a phonograph) to show the world’s first films to paying customers. How cinema was shown way back when during those nascent days is a topic I know little about but need to do a deeper dive on in the future. The topic sounds endlessly fascinating to a nerd like myself.

I’ve not seen the Scorsese film Hugo but I do realize Melies is a key character & like in the film, he had his own automatons. My granting a rare 5 star review is not entirely due to the content of this short (shorts are always difficult to rate as it’s not a fair comparison to feature films) but rather the story of how Automaton was discovered. I'm thankful the LoC was able to restore this nitrate print; it's always nice seeing silent cinema "found" again-much of it is still lost. Perhaps London After Midnight is out there somewhere...