VIDEO
Photographic portrait of Georges Méliès at 34, in 1895. Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons, retouched
April 15, 2026
Library of Congress
By Neely Tucker
The reels of film were old and battered and no one knew what was on them.
They were from before World War I and had been shuttled around from basements to barns to garages and had just been dropped off at the Library. There were about 10 of them and they were rusted. Some were misshapen. The nitrate film stock had crumbled to bits on some; other strips were stuck together.
The librarians peeled them apart and gently looked them over, frame by frame.
And there, on one film, was a black star painted onto a pedestal in the center of the screen. The action was of a magician and a robot battling it out in slapstick fashion. It took a bit, but then the gasp of realization: They were looking at “Gugusse and the Automaton,” a long-lost film by the iconic French filmmaker George Méliès at his Star Film company.
The 45-second film, made around 1897, was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot, which had endeared it to generations of science fiction fans, even if they knew it only by reputation. It had not been seen by anyone in likely more than a century. The find, made last September but now being announced publicly, is a small but important addition to the legacy of world cinema and one of its founders.Gugusse et l’Automate English language title: Gugusse and the automaton
“This story is one that you see movies or television shows written about,” says Jason Evans Groth, curator of the Library’s moving image section.
“This is one of the collections that makes you realize why you do this,” said Courtney Holschuh, the archive technician who unraveled the film. (Here’s how they did it.)
Equally delighted was Bill McFarland, the donor who had driven the box of films from his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, to have the cache evaluated.
His great-grandfather, William Delisle Frisbee, had been a potato farmer and schoolteacher in western Pennsylvania by day, but by night he was a traveling showman. He drove his horse and buggy from town to town to dazzle the locals with a projector and some of the world’s first moving pictures.
He set up shop in a local schoolroom, church, lodge or civic auditorium and showed magic lantern slides and short films with music from a newfangled phonograph. It was shocking.
“They must have been thrilled,” McFarland said. “They must have been out of their minds to see this motion picture and to hear the Edison phonograph.”
A Méliès film would have been an unforgettable experience to almost anyone in the 19th century.
A prominent French stage magician, he turned to filmmaking as soon as he saw the Lumière brothers’ world-first motion pictures in Paris in 1895. That a camera could rapidly project a series of still images on film and thus make them appear to move – “motion pictures” – was seen as a magic trick unto itself.
Méliès built his own camera and a glass studio (like a greenhouse) in Paris. He filmed ordinary scenes at first, but after accidentally discovering that a jump cut appeared on film as an astonishing transformation, he pioneered other tricks such as double exposure, black screens and forced perspective. All of these became staples of cinema. On screen, he could make a man appear to take off his head and flip it in the air, or a woman disappear, reappear and double.
He was also a devotee of the science fiction work of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and his films often featured surreal, fantastical sets and manic action. An image from his most famous film, “A Trip to the Moon” – that of a rocket landing in the eye of the man on the moon – became the image representing early cinema. It now plays at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His 1896 short, “Le Manoir du Diable,” is considered to be the world’s first horror film.
More than a century later, his lasting impact was exemplified in Martin Scorsese’s 2011 film “Hugo,” about a boy and an automaton in 1931 Paris. An elderly Méliès – by then, as in real life, a toy-shop owner largely forgotten by the world – appears as the boy’s soft-spoken savior.
“Gugusse,” for its part, is a one-shot, one-reel short filmed in front of a painted screen made to look like a workshop in which clocks and automatons were being made. For centuries, inventors and engineers had made wind-up automatons – contraptions full of gears and levers with a shell that looked like a person – that could, as the gears unwound, do all sorts of things, even writing and drawing.
In “Gugusse,” the magician (Méliès), winds up an automaton dressed like the famous clown Pierrot, which is standing on a pedestal. Once wound up, the clown begins to beat the magician with his walking stick. The magician retaliates by getting a huge sledgehammer and bashing the automaton over the head, with each blow seeming to shrink it in half, until it is just a small doll. The magician then smashes it into the floor.
Library of Congress
By Neely Tucker
The reels of film were old and battered and no one knew what was on them.
They were from before World War I and had been shuttled around from basements to barns to garages and had just been dropped off at the Library. There were about 10 of them and they were rusted. Some were misshapen. The nitrate film stock had crumbled to bits on some; other strips were stuck together.
The librarians peeled them apart and gently looked them over, frame by frame.
And there, on one film, was a black star painted onto a pedestal in the center of the screen. The action was of a magician and a robot battling it out in slapstick fashion. It took a bit, but then the gasp of realization: They were looking at “Gugusse and the Automaton,” a long-lost film by the iconic French filmmaker George Méliès at his Star Film company.
The 45-second film, made around 1897, was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot, which had endeared it to generations of science fiction fans, even if they knew it only by reputation. It had not been seen by anyone in likely more than a century. The find, made last September but now being announced publicly, is a small but important addition to the legacy of world cinema and one of its founders.Gugusse et l’Automate English language title: Gugusse and the automaton
“This story is one that you see movies or television shows written about,” says Jason Evans Groth, curator of the Library’s moving image section.
“This is one of the collections that makes you realize why you do this,” said Courtney Holschuh, the archive technician who unraveled the film. (Here’s how they did it.)
Equally delighted was Bill McFarland, the donor who had driven the box of films from his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, to have the cache evaluated.
His great-grandfather, William Delisle Frisbee, had been a potato farmer and schoolteacher in western Pennsylvania by day, but by night he was a traveling showman. He drove his horse and buggy from town to town to dazzle the locals with a projector and some of the world’s first moving pictures.
He set up shop in a local schoolroom, church, lodge or civic auditorium and showed magic lantern slides and short films with music from a newfangled phonograph. It was shocking.
“They must have been thrilled,” McFarland said. “They must have been out of their minds to see this motion picture and to hear the Edison phonograph.”
A Méliès film would have been an unforgettable experience to almost anyone in the 19th century.
A prominent French stage magician, he turned to filmmaking as soon as he saw the Lumière brothers’ world-first motion pictures in Paris in 1895. That a camera could rapidly project a series of still images on film and thus make them appear to move – “motion pictures” – was seen as a magic trick unto itself.
Méliès built his own camera and a glass studio (like a greenhouse) in Paris. He filmed ordinary scenes at first, but after accidentally discovering that a jump cut appeared on film as an astonishing transformation, he pioneered other tricks such as double exposure, black screens and forced perspective. All of these became staples of cinema. On screen, he could make a man appear to take off his head and flip it in the air, or a woman disappear, reappear and double.
He was also a devotee of the science fiction work of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and his films often featured surreal, fantastical sets and manic action. An image from his most famous film, “A Trip to the Moon” – that of a rocket landing in the eye of the man on the moon – became the image representing early cinema. It now plays at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His 1896 short, “Le Manoir du Diable,” is considered to be the world’s first horror film.
More than a century later, his lasting impact was exemplified in Martin Scorsese’s 2011 film “Hugo,” about a boy and an automaton in 1931 Paris. An elderly Méliès – by then, as in real life, a toy-shop owner largely forgotten by the world – appears as the boy’s soft-spoken savior.
“Gugusse,” for its part, is a one-shot, one-reel short filmed in front of a painted screen made to look like a workshop in which clocks and automatons were being made. For centuries, inventors and engineers had made wind-up automatons – contraptions full of gears and levers with a shell that looked like a person – that could, as the gears unwound, do all sorts of things, even writing and drawing.
In “Gugusse,” the magician (Méliès), winds up an automaton dressed like the famous clown Pierrot, which is standing on a pedestal. Once wound up, the clown begins to beat the magician with his walking stick. The magician retaliates by getting a huge sledgehammer and bashing the automaton over the head, with each blow seeming to shrink it in half, until it is just a small doll. The magician then smashes it into the floor.
Méliès made more than 500 films but never progressed beyond his early technical achievements. The film world passed him by. In World War I, the negatives for most of his films were melted down for silver and celluloid, and he burned more himself after the war.
But because his work had once been so popular – and because of widespread pirating – duplicate copies remained, and today about 300 of his films are known to exist. The Library has about 60. The “Gugusse” print McFarland gave to the Library is a 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 – in 4K, no less.
The cache of Frisbee’s exhibition films also contained another well-known Méliès film from 1900, “The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match,” as well as fragments of an early Thomas Edison film, “The Burning Stable.” They survived due to McFarland and his family preserving them for a century, if often in haphazard circumstances.
After Frisbee died in 1937, two small trunks of his old projectors and films, along with some of his diaries and papers, went to his daughter (McFarland’s grandmother), who passed them along to her son (McFarland’s dad), who passed them along to him.
McFarland didn’t know what was on the reels – they could no longer be safely run through a projector – and after years of searching for a home for them, a lab technician in Michigan suggested he contact the Library.
“The moment we set our eyes on this box of film, we knew it was something special,” said George Willeman, the Library’s nitrate film vault leader.
McFarland, relieved to have finally found a home for his family’s treasure chest, found it all fascinating, the films and the diaries of his wandering showman of a great-grandfather.
“He talks about full houses, and rowdy houses, and canceled shows, and he went all the way to the Pennsylvania-Maryland line, and I think into Ohio as well,” he said. “He made as much as $20 bucks a night, I see in his records, and sometimes he made $1.35 for the night, you know?”
It was, this deep dive into the old boxes and trunks in the attic, a magic trick known to researchers, historians and librarians – documents from another time drawing you back into a world gone by.
The cache of Frisbee’s exhibition films also contained another well-known Méliès film from 1900, “The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match,” as well as fragments of an early Thomas Edison film, “The Burning Stable.” They survived due to McFarland and his family preserving them for a century, if often in haphazard circumstances.
After Frisbee died in 1937, two small trunks of his old projectors and films, along with some of his diaries and papers, went to his daughter (McFarland’s grandmother), who passed them along to her son (McFarland’s dad), who passed them along to him.
McFarland didn’t know what was on the reels – they could no longer be safely run through a projector – and after years of searching for a home for them, a lab technician in Michigan suggested he contact the Library.
“The moment we set our eyes on this box of film, we knew it was something special,” said George Willeman, the Library’s nitrate film vault leader.
McFarland, relieved to have finally found a home for his family’s treasure chest, found it all fascinating, the films and the diaries of his wandering showman of a great-grandfather.
“He talks about full houses, and rowdy houses, and canceled shows, and he went all the way to the Pennsylvania-Maryland line, and I think into Ohio as well,” he said. “He made as much as $20 bucks a night, I see in his records, and sometimes he made $1.35 for the night, you know?”
It was, this deep dive into the old boxes and trunks in the attic, a magic trick known to researchers, historians and librarians – documents from another time drawing you back into a world gone by.
This article was published by the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with millions of books, films and video, audio recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office.
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with millions of books, films and video, audio recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office.
Inside the fireproof vault housing US movie history
By AFP
April 15, 2026
The highly combustible nitrate film used from the dawn of cinema in the 1890s until the early 1950s has a permanent home in a vault run by the Library of Congress - Copyright AFP/File Ina FASSBENDER
Matthew PENNINGTON
Once upon a time in the golden days of Hollywood, the movies were bigger, the stars brighter and the celluloid they were filmed on was, well, explosive.
Which is why the US Library of Congress maintains a special, fireproof vault in Virginia, near Washington, DC.
There, the highly combustible nitrate film used from the dawn of cinema in the 1890s until the early 1950s has a permanent home, rarely accessed by the public but toured by AFP.
Lost movies on the volatile but durable medium are still being discovered and preserved in the facility. And thanks to digitization, the lost treasures can also be safely viewed for the first time in decades.
Some 145,000 film reels are stored in strictly fireproof conditions in a vast, chilly vault at the library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia.
It is crammed with cinematic treasures that rekindle warm memories of an era when movies ruled.
The vault’s leader, George Willeman, reeled off the names of classics with negatives there: “Casablanca,” Frank Capra-directed films like “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and the grand-daddy of all action movies, “The Great Train Robbery” from 1903.
Down a spartan corridor so long it seemed to recede into the distance, he unlocked a series of cell-like steel doors.
Inside each of the 124 cells — there’s one dedicated just to the Disney archive — were floor-to-ceiling cubby holes.
Each one held film canisters containing negatives and prints, all arranged meticulously: packed tight to prevent canisters from opening, but far enough apart to prevent any fire from spreading.
Since being set up in 2007 in a former US Federal Reserve building in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the vault has maintained a perfect no-fire record.
– Film nerds’ delight –
Nitrate film is just part of the center’s collection of more than six million items of moving images and recorded sound. They also have supporting scripts, posters and photos.
Willeman, who sports a button badge with the invocation to “Experience Nitrate,” said the Library of Congress began preserving the medium when in the 1960s, “it was discovered that so much film was being lost” due to fires and defunct companies throwing negatives away.
With the American Film Institute, the library began collecting and copying nitrate film, including the holdings of big Hollywood studios – RKO, Warner Brothers, Universal, Columbia and Walt Disney.
They also tapped the personal collections of film icons like movie impresario and silent era star Mary Pickford and motion pictures inventor Thomas Edison, whose early studio produced hundreds of films.
“We’re 50 some years in, and it (the collection) just keeps growing,” Willeman said.
With the arrival of digital media, the mission has expanded beyond preservation for purists and cinema historians — who say movies just look better on nitrate footage — to putting old films online.
“Now we can make them available for everybody, which to me, being the film nerd I’ve been since, like, third grade, is just amazing.”
Nitrate film made by early artisans often preserves better than the later safety film, said Courtney Holschuh, nitrate archive technician.
At a workstation with no light bulbs or exposed batteries — either of which could ignite dust or gas from vintage film — Holschuh recounted how last September she carefully peeled apart a cache of 10 vintage reels donated by a retired schoolteacher.
There were 42 different titles on the reels — only 26 of which have been identified. They included a lost film, “Gugusse and the Automaton,” by French cinema pioneer Georges Melies.
“So much of our early film history is still out there for us to see and to experience,” Willeman said.
By AFP
April 15, 2026
The highly combustible nitrate film used from the dawn of cinema in the 1890s until the early 1950s has a permanent home in a vault run by the Library of Congress - Copyright AFP/File Ina FASSBENDER
Matthew PENNINGTON
Once upon a time in the golden days of Hollywood, the movies were bigger, the stars brighter and the celluloid they were filmed on was, well, explosive.
Which is why the US Library of Congress maintains a special, fireproof vault in Virginia, near Washington, DC.
There, the highly combustible nitrate film used from the dawn of cinema in the 1890s until the early 1950s has a permanent home, rarely accessed by the public but toured by AFP.
Lost movies on the volatile but durable medium are still being discovered and preserved in the facility. And thanks to digitization, the lost treasures can also be safely viewed for the first time in decades.
Some 145,000 film reels are stored in strictly fireproof conditions in a vast, chilly vault at the library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia.
It is crammed with cinematic treasures that rekindle warm memories of an era when movies ruled.
The vault’s leader, George Willeman, reeled off the names of classics with negatives there: “Casablanca,” Frank Capra-directed films like “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and the grand-daddy of all action movies, “The Great Train Robbery” from 1903.
Down a spartan corridor so long it seemed to recede into the distance, he unlocked a series of cell-like steel doors.
Inside each of the 124 cells — there’s one dedicated just to the Disney archive — were floor-to-ceiling cubby holes.
Each one held film canisters containing negatives and prints, all arranged meticulously: packed tight to prevent canisters from opening, but far enough apart to prevent any fire from spreading.
Since being set up in 2007 in a former US Federal Reserve building in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the vault has maintained a perfect no-fire record.
– Film nerds’ delight –
Nitrate film is just part of the center’s collection of more than six million items of moving images and recorded sound. They also have supporting scripts, posters and photos.
Willeman, who sports a button badge with the invocation to “Experience Nitrate,” said the Library of Congress began preserving the medium when in the 1960s, “it was discovered that so much film was being lost” due to fires and defunct companies throwing negatives away.
With the American Film Institute, the library began collecting and copying nitrate film, including the holdings of big Hollywood studios – RKO, Warner Brothers, Universal, Columbia and Walt Disney.
They also tapped the personal collections of film icons like movie impresario and silent era star Mary Pickford and motion pictures inventor Thomas Edison, whose early studio produced hundreds of films.
“We’re 50 some years in, and it (the collection) just keeps growing,” Willeman said.
With the arrival of digital media, the mission has expanded beyond preservation for purists and cinema historians — who say movies just look better on nitrate footage — to putting old films online.
“Now we can make them available for everybody, which to me, being the film nerd I’ve been since, like, third grade, is just amazing.”
Nitrate film made by early artisans often preserves better than the later safety film, said Courtney Holschuh, nitrate archive technician.
At a workstation with no light bulbs or exposed batteries — either of which could ignite dust or gas from vintage film — Holschuh recounted how last September she carefully peeled apart a cache of 10 vintage reels donated by a retired schoolteacher.
There were 42 different titles on the reels — only 26 of which have been identified. They included a lost film, “Gugusse and the Automaton,” by French cinema pioneer Georges Melies.
“So much of our early film history is still out there for us to see and to experience,” Willeman said.
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