Lost-Lost Film by French Cinema Pioneer Turns Up in Michigan
A previously unseen Georges Méliès film, Gugusse and the Automaton (c. 1897), was discovered in a century-old trunk in a garage in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and has been donated to the U.S. Library of Congress. Bill McFarland, who had safeguarded the trunk for about two decades and drove roughly 700 miles to deliver 10 nitrate film reels to the Library, said earlier attempts to place them with museums and antique stores failed due to the reels’ combustibility. Library technicians identified Méliès’s Star Film company mark and restored a 45-second, one-shot clip that includes what the article calls the first known moving image of a robot; the Library has digitized and released it. The trunk also contained Méliès’s The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match (1900) and fragments of Thomas Edison’s The Burning Stable (1896), and the Library’s George Willeman said staff recognized the find as significant upon seeing the box.
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This story was covered in Biennales in Flux, Institutions Under Pressure