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ISSN 2836-9459 The 45-second film, made around 1897, was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot “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. 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 stalled moment of filming resulted an astonishing transformation of objects on the finished film, he pioneered other tricks such as double exposure, black screens and forced perspective. (The preceding sentence has been updated from an earlier description.) 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. 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.