{"id":5015,"date":"2026-03-10T13:38:43","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T20:38:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/?p=5015"},"modified":"2026-03-10T13:38:43","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T20:38:43","slug":"lost-for-more-than-a-century-the-first-sci-fi-film-ever-made-resurfaces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/?p=5015","title":{"rendered":"Lost for More Than a Century, the First \u2018Sci-Fi\u2019 Film Ever Made Resurfaces"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lost<\/p>\n

Around 1897, the French director Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s<\/a> made a silent short film that, until last month, hadn\u2019t been publicly viewable for more than a century. \u201cGugusse et l\u2019Automate<\/a>,\u201d or \u201cGugusse and the Automaton,\u201d is a 45-second slapstick piece featuring a magician and a Pierrot<\/a>-styled robot as they duke it out. <\/p>\n

M\u00e9li\u00e8s is best known for \u201cA Trip to the Moon,<\/a>\u201d a short film from 1902 that famously features astromoners landing their capsule into the eye of the moon. The director\u2019s work is widely regarded as some of the first within fantasy and science fiction, with \u201cGugusse et l\u2019Automate\u201d being a long-lost addition to his canon.<\/p>\n

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\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

This film resurfaced recently when Bill McFarland drove from his Grand Rapids, Michigan-home to the Library\u2019s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, with a cache of reels that once belonged to his great-grandfather, William Delisle Frisbee. Passed down through the family, this collection was part of Frisbee\u2019s traveling showbusiness, in which he packed up his horse and buggy in western Pennsylvania and traveled to nearby towns to screen these early \u201cmoving pictures\u201d accompanied by music from a phonograph.<\/p>\n

According to the library<\/a>, McFarland\u2019s copy of \u201cGugusse et l\u2019Automate\u201d is \u201ca duplicate at least three times removed from the original. Library technicians spent more than a week scanning and stabilizing it onto a digital format, so that it can now be seen by anyone online\u2014in 4K, no less.\u201d<\/p>\n

The collection also contained M\u00e9li\u00e8s\u2019 \u201cThe Fat and Lean Wrestling Match\u201d and parts of Thomas Edison\u2019s \u201cThe Burning Stable.\u201d See more of conservators\u2019 unraveling process on Instagram<\/a>. (via Kottke<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member<\/a> today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Lost for More Than a Century, the First \u2018Sci-Fi\u2019 Film Ever Made Resurfaces<\/a> appeared first on Colossal<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Around 1897, the French director Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s made a silent short film that, until last month, hadn\u2019t been publicly viewable for more than a century. \u201cGugusse et l\u2019Automate,\u201d or \u201cGugusse…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5015\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}