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The first appearance on film of what might be called a robot has made its way to the Library of Congress. Filmmaking pioneer Georges Melies created the 45-second film strip in 1897, but it was considered lost until it turned up recently in Michigan. NPR's Bob Mondello has details.
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: The inquiry was like thousands of others. Somebody had potentially cool films they thought might interest the Library of Congress. But it was brand new for Jason Evans Groth.
JASON EVANS GROTH: It was my second week of work as the curator.
MONDELLO: In September, he stepped outside the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, to meet Bill and Mary McFarland, who had driven from Michigan with about 40 strips of celluloid that had once belonged to Bill's great-grandfather.
EVANS GROTH: They popped the trunk on their Toyota Camry and revealed a wooden box, basically like a stage treasure box, that was just full of rusty reels and old film, which I carried inside.
MONDELLO: To archive technician Courtney Holschuh and nitrate film vault leader George Willeman, who took out the reels and...
GEORGE WILLEMAN: Having not even unrolled them, we're like, oh, boy, 'cause they have a certain look to them. And I could tell the reels they were on dated from before World War I. But the Melies, that was a total surprise.
MONDELLO: Georges Melies, a French filmmaker slash magician, who realized before audiences did that film edits could make things appear and disappear on screen.
WILLEMAN: He kind of "discovered" - I'm doing air quotes. He discovered special effects.
MONDELLO: He also founded the Star Film Company, and there's a star on a pedestal in this film. So Willeman emailed a frame grab to an expert in Paris, and...
WILLEMAN: Within an hour or so, he came back and said, oh, it's this film, because they've got catalogs galore over there. And he gave us the title of "Gugusse And The Automaton," and that it's from 1897, that no copies are known to survive on it and that it was known to be the first film to feature a robot.
MONDELLO: A term that did not exist until some 23 years later. Still, what else would you call a figure that when Melies winds it with a crank...
WILLEMAN: Goes through this motion, and then it suddenly gets bigger. And it does it again, and then it gets bigger. Then it does again, and then it whacks him with a stick.
MONDELLO: At which point Melies...
WILLEMAN: He starts smashing it with a mallet and smashes it back down smaller and smaller until he flattens it.
MONDELLO: So to recap, a manmade machine gets too big for its britches, attacks its maker, and the maker fights back.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRAD FIEDEL'S "TERMINATOR ARRIVAL")
MONDELLO: It's "The Terminator," right?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Laughter) Yes.
WILLEMAN: Also, the triumph over AI.
MONDELLO: And curator Groth says he learned from Bill McFarland that this forward-looking motion picture, which would have astonished audiences who'd never seen photographs move, traveled all over the Midwest.
EVANS GROTH: His great-grandfather, William Delisle Frisbee, was a storied character in his family's history. A farmer, an educator, a community-focused person who was also a technophile. He would go to churches and community centers in a buggy. And he has all these records of going to different towns, showing movies. So Bill grows up hearing about his really cool great-grandfather just doing something new.
MONDELLO: So new, it seemed almost like magic, as do some details of what film archivists can glean from a strip of celluloid. For instance, Willeman says this "Gugusse And The Automaton" is a copy of a copy of a copy. How does he know?
WILLEMAN: It's kind of like telling how old a tree is by counting its rings. Every time they duplicate a film, it leaves an imprint of the previous roll of film. So we basically start from the sprocket hole edge and start counting shadows going into the picture. So we know that different people were doing this. It's actually possible that this is an early example of a pirated dupe.
MONDELLO: A pirated dupe that is now preserved for the ages and available to the world in ultrahigh definition on the Library of Congress website. I'm Bob Mondello.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN")
PETER ALLEN: (Singing) No need to... Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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