It’s rare to watch a nearly 130-year-old film and experience the thrill of a fresh discovery. Thanks to the U.S. Library of Congress, a work long thought to be the first science fiction film — and, more importantly, long believed lost — has been found, restored, and stabilized: Georges Méliès’ Gugusse et l’Automate, or Gugusse and the Automaton. You can stream it now in 4K to see what may be the first robot ever captured on film, plus possibly the earliest on-screen fable about technology’s risks, even though it’s a 45-second comedy short.
Casual film fans may recognize Méliès from Hugo (2011), Martin Scorsese’s Best Picture-nominated movie where Ben Kingsley portrays an elderly, fictionalized version of the French filmmaker, inventor, and stage magician. Between 1895 and 1912, he created more than 500 silent shorts — the most renowned being 1902’s Le Voyage dans la Lune (or A Trip to the Moon). Sadly, most of his works were destroyed and are still fully or partially lost. This made Gugusse a legend: often discussed, but unseen for over 100 years.
That changed recently when archivists separated clumped nitrate film strips donated in September (per a compelling blog post from the Library’s Office of Communications). They then realized they were viewing Méliès’ famous 111th production — chronologically, only the 15th of his works to survive completely intact.
Gugusse is, by modern standards, quite simple, but for a late 19th-century film, it remains a showcase of skillful artistry and creative ingenuity. It features a static wide shot of a painted set: in front of it, an inventor or traveling showman (Méliès) winds a life-size automaton (played by a human actor) that repeats programmed swinging motions with a staff. However, each time the robot moves, it grows mysteriously larger — a taller actor takes over after a not-so-subtle match cut, a trick Méliès frequently used. Eventually, the third and tallest automaton breaks its pre-set loop, hits its creator on the head, and he retaliates with an absurdly large hammer: he smashes it down to size, then destroys it in a puff of hand-colored smoke.
Méliès was an entertainer, and automata fascinated him (as explained in Hugo and Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the book it’s based on). He owned a large collection of these humanoid animatronics, so it’s no shock they eventually appeared in his films — though played by real actors. This human portrayal of mechanical beings was probably a logistical choice (it was easier for Méliès to bring his vision to life this way), but it still mirrors the underlying tech-related anxieties that would emerge in cinema over the next century. In films like James Cameron’s The Terminator, the robots that overthrow humanity are also modeled after humans — just as modern robots and generative AI often have human-like proportions and emotions, sparking valid concerns about human irrelevance.
Linking these modern worries to Méliès’ time isn’t a stretch. 19th-century industrialization already sparked pushback against automation — like the Luddite textile workers in England in the 1810s — so fear of technological progress was already present. In 1898 (just one year after Gugusse), inventor Nikola Tesla showed his own automata at Madison Square Garden: a radio-controlled boat. A New York Times reporter asked if it could be a weapon; Tesla replied it was the start of “the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race.” Later, Czech playwright Karel Čapek coined the term “robot” in his 1921 satire Rossum’s Universal Robots, about synthetic factory workers who overthrow their human creators.
This mirrors what’s in Méliès’ once-lost film. Even though it’s under a minute long, its story is about both robotic rebellion and creative arrogance. This theme has been a staple of modern sci-fi, and was likely solidified by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), widely called the first sci-fi novel. Though not about robots, Frankenstein shares similar fears: a human animating non-living things in their own image, and the resulting consequences. It’s long been thought Shelley knew about humanoid robots then — Swiss automata in the form of child dolls (made by father-son inventors Pierre and Henri Jaquet-Droz) were popular in the late 1700s.
Given Gugusse and the Automaton’s comedic tone, its ending is far more upbeat than most sci-fi of its kind: Méliès stands victorious over the invention he accidentally unleashed. It’s a charming magic trick with a happy ending — the sort of optimistic sci-fi fable modern audiences rarely see, even though they’re surrounded by its many descendants (which focus more on “self-destructive arrogance” than the fix). The film’s revival, nearly 130 years after it was made, is a timely reminder of the ethical questions and replacement fears that have accompanied tech progress for centuries. And at the very least, it’s a silly, farcical reminder: with a big enough mallet and a strong swing, machines can be put back in their place.