Gugusse and the Automaton

Star Film catalogue number 111, long lost and restored by the Library of Congress in 2026 from a Michigan nitrate print, is almost certainly the first robot on film, decades before Karel Čapek coined the word. Méliès, as the clown Gugusse, cranks a child-sized Pierrot automaton on a pedestal; it grows to adult size, seizes its own limbs, and clubs him. He hammers it back to doll size until it vanishes. Forty-five seconds, one shot, a painted clockmaker's workshop. Rediscovered among reels that also held Fat and Lean Wrestling Match, it is Méliès's slapstick of creation and destruction: the machine that will not stay wound.