Filmmaker Georges Méliès employed some of his signature special effects techniques to create comedy in “Gugusse and the Automaton”
A still from “Gugusse and the Automaton” showing the magician and his robot, Pierrot National Audio-Visual Conservation Center
In a battered trunk full of his great-grandfather’s nitrate film rolls, a Michigan man discovered a relic of filmmaking history: a copy of “ Gugusse and the Automaton ,” a long-lost 45-second film by French auteur Georges Méliès , a pioneer of early cinema.
The slapstick short film, created around 1897, was famous for containing the very first on-screen appearance of a robot—preceding the term itself by more than two decades.…
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