{"id":331051,"date":"2026-03-10T04:29:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T04:29:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/331051\/"},"modified":"2026-03-10T04:29:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T04:29:10","slug":"129-years-later-the-first-ever-sci-fi-film-has-finally-been-found","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/331051\/","title":{"rendered":"129 Years Later, The First-Ever Sci-Fi Film Has Finally Been Found"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s 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>, a movie long-considered the first piece of science fiction cinema \u2014 and more pertinently, long-considered lost \u2014 has now been found, restored, and stabilized: Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Casual moviegoers might know M\u00e9li\u00e8s as the subject of Hugo (2011)<\/a>, Martin Scorsese\u2019s 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\u2019s Le Voyage dans la Lune<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n

That all changed when archivists recently pulled apart congealed nitrate film strips donated to them in September (as described in a fascinating blog post<\/a> by the Library\u2019s Office of Communications). It was then that they realized they were looking at M\u00e9li\u00e8s\u2019 famed 111th production. Chronologically, it\u2019s only the 15th to survive in full.<\/p>\n

Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s is best known for his widely influential film, A Trip to the Moon.<\/p>\n

Apic\/Hulton Archive\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Gugusse is, by modern standards, rather simple, but for a film made in the late 19th century, it remains an example of deft craftsmanship and ingenious imagination. It consists of a static wide shot of a painted set, in front of which an inventor or traveling showman (M\u00e9li\u00e8s) winds a life-size automaton, played by a human actor, which repeats its programmed swinging motions with a staff in hand. However, with each iteration of the robot\u2019s movements, it grows mysteriously larger. A taller actor stands in each time after a not-so-hidden match cut \u2014 a sleight-of-hand M\u00e9li\u00e8s frequently employed. Eventually, the third and tallest version of the automaton strays from its pre-ordained loop and bonks its creator on the head, after which he responds in kind with a comically large hammer, smashing it down to size, and ultimately destroying it in a puff of hand-colored smoke.<\/p>\n

M\u00e9li\u00e8s was an entertainer, and automata were an area of interest for him (as detailed in Hugo and the book on which it was based, Brian Selznick\u2019s The Invention of Hugo Cabret). He had a sizable collection of these humanoid animatronics, so it\u2019s no surprise that they would eventually make an appearance in his movies, albeit played by real actors. This human embodiment of mechanical beings was likely a matter of logistics \u2014 it was probably easier for M\u00e9li\u00e8s to execute his vision this way \u2014 but it can\u2019t help but reflect some of the underlying anxieties surrounding technology that would crop up in cinema over the following century. In films like James Cameron\u2019s The Terminator, the robotic creations that overthrow humanity are similarly rendered in our own image, the same way modern robots and generative A.I. are often imbued with human proportions and emotive properties, yielding understandable worry<\/a> about human obsolescence.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t a stretch to connect these modern concerns to M\u00e9li\u00e8s\u2019 era. The industrialization of the 19th century had already yielded opposition to automation, such as from the Luddite textile workers in England in the 1810s, so apprehension about technological advancement was already in the air. In 1898, just one year after Gugusse, inventor Nikola Tesla exhibited his own automata at Madison Square Garden, a radio-controlled sea vessel, which a New York Times reporter questioned as a potential weapon. In response, Tesla declared<\/a> it the arrival of \u201cthe first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race.\u201d Eventually, the term \u201crobot\u201d would be coined by Czech playwright Karel \u010capek in his 1921 satire Rossum’s Universal Robots, about synthetic factory workers who overthrow their human masters.<\/p>\n

M\u00e9li\u00e8s\u2019 film being restored.<\/p>\n

GABRIEL BOUYS\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

This is not unlike what we see in M\u00e9li\u00e8s\u2019s once-lost film. Despite its runtime of less than a minute, the story it tells is one of not only robotic rebellion, but creative hubris. This theme has run throughout much of modern science fiction, and was arguably cemented by Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein<\/a>; or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818 and widely considered the first science fiction novel. While not directly about robotics, Frankenstein is buoyed by similar anxieties, of man animating the non-living in his own image, and the consequences therein. After all, it\u2019s long been speculated that Shelley was aware of humanoid robots at the time, given the late 18th century popularity<\/a> of Swiss automata in the visage of childlike dolls, built by father-son inventor duo Pierre and Henri Jaquet-Droz.<\/p>\n

Given the comedic tone of Gugusse and the Automaton, its conclusion is much more upbeat than most sci-fi of its ilk, with M\u00e9li\u00e8s standing triumphant over the invention he inadvertently lets loose. It\u2019s a delightful magic trick with a happy ending, the kind of upbeat science fiction fable modern audiences rarely see despite being inundated with numerous descendants, whose focus is more the \u201cself-destructive arrogance\u201d part of the equation, rather than the corrective. The film\u2019s revival, nearly 13 decades after its creation, is a timely reminder of the ethical dilemmas and fears of replacement that have accompanied technological advancement for several centuries. And if nothing else, it\u2019s a broad, farcical reminder that with a big enough mallet and a hearty swing, the machines can be put back in their place.<\/p>\n

Learn Something New Every Day<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s not every day you get to watch a nearly 130-year-old movie and feel the joy of new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":331052,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,3838,9884,1154,7349,26992,85,163222,46,397,7166],"class_list":["post-331051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-entertainment-news","tag-freelance","tag-history","tag-homepage","tag-hp-latest","tag-il","tag-inverse-recommends-movies","tag-israel","tag-movies","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/331052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}