Gugusse et l’Automate is believed to be the first film to show a robot
Dating from 1897, the silent film Gugusse et l’Automate, by George Méliès, is the oldest cinematographic work to feature a robot.
It was thought to be lost until… the restored video of the oldest film with a robot.
This piece of techno-cinematic history, from its name Gugusse and l’Automateis, after all, very much alive, as he made a point of remembering.
Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès is today considered one of the great pioneers of cinema, introducing many innovations that are now part of the basic set of filmmaking tools.
While other filmmakers were content with films that consisted only of trains arriving at stations or people walking down the street, Méliès had the idea of “artificially organized scenes” to create a linked narrative.
Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès faith one of the first to create what we would call today special effects movies.
As New Atlas reminds us, the artist’s adventure began in 1896, when his camera jammed while he was filming at the Place de l’Opéra, in Paris, resulting in a bus that “turned” into a hearse. He then began to explore how to take advantage of this technique by mixing it with all types of stage magic and illusions.
To this, Méliès added camera tricks like double exposure, dissolves, manual colorization, and matte shots, which are particularly impressive when you realize that he had to achieve most of his effects within the camera itself before the film was developed.
The result was a series of classics such as The Devil’s Mansion, Cinderella, A Journey Through the Impossible and A Journey to the Moon. Unfortunately, back then films were only shown once and then forgotten. The result was a depressing number of works that have disappeared forever.
One of them was thought to be Gugusse et l’Automate
For more than a century it was believed that the film Gugusse et l’Automate was lost.
However, in 2025 a deteriorated copy on 10 rusty reels of nitrate film was found in the William DeLyle Frisbee Collection at the Library of Congress in Culpeper, Virginia.
The coils had languished in basements and garages for decades before being donated by Bill McFarland of Michigan.
Once this remarkable discovery was identified, the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center undertook restoration by stabilizing and digitizing the fragile, decaying film.
Less than a minute of show
The plot of Gugusse et l’Automate is quite simple. In less than a minute, a clown named Gugusse shows an automaton in the shape of a little boy. As you turn a crank, the automaton waves a stick in the air.
Suddenly, the figure becomes large and repeats the movement. Finally, it grows to the size of a large man and starts hitting Gugusse on the head.
Enraged, Gugusse throws the figure to the ground and hits its head with a huge clown hammer. The figure becomes smaller with each blow until, finally, it turns into a puppet, which Gugusse destroys with a final blow.
