It’s not every day you get to watch a nearly 130-year-old movie and feel the joy of new discovery. Thanks to the U.S. Library of Congress, a movie long-considered the first piece of science fiction cinema — and more pertinently, long-considered lost — has now been found, restored, and stabilized: Georges Méliès’s Gugusse et l'Automate, or Gugusse and the Automaton. You can watch it right now in 4K and see what might be the first ever robot cast in celluloid, and perhaps even the first on-screen parable about the dangers of technology, albeit in the form of a 45-second comedy short.
Casual moviegoers might know Méliès as the subject of Hugo (2011), Martin Scorsese’s Best Picture nominee in which Ben Kingsley plays an aged, fictionalized version of the French filmmaker, inventor, and stage magician. He made over 500 silent shorts between 1895 and 1912, the most famous of which is arguably 1902’s Le Voyage dans la Lune (or A Trip to the Moon). Unfortunately, the majority of his works were destroyed and remain wholly or partially lost. This rendered Gugusse the stuff of legend, often written about, but not seen in over a century.
