Metropolis, Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Terminator, Short Circuit, RoboCop, Ghost in the Shell, The Iron Giant, WALL‑E, Ex Machina: there is a parallel history of cinema to be told entirely through its robots. That such a history must begin with the work of Georges Méliès may not come as a surprise, given that he invented so many of the techniques of science-fiction filmmaking. But until recently, we didn’t actually know that the cinema pioneer who “invented everything” ever put a robot onscreen. The evidence turned up among a collection of “old and battered” reels of film that were “from before World War I and had been shuttled around from basements to barns to garages and had just been dropped off at the Library.”
So writes the Library of Congress’ Neely Tucker, who goes on to describe the action of one of the films involving “a magician and a robot battling it out in slapstick fashion. It took a bit, but then the gasp of realization: They were looking at ‘Gugusse and the Automaton,’ a long-lost film by the iconic French filmmaker Georges Méliès at his Star Film company.”
Méliès himself plays the magician, who “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.”
In just 45 seconds, this simple film would have astonished audiences back in 1897 — and indeed retains the power to impress, provided you consider that none of the techniques to realize its effects were widely known before Méliès attempted them. He did so five years before ‘A Trip to the Moon,’ a hugely ambitious cinematic endeavor by comparison, and by far the single film that best represents his legacy.’ Yet it and Gugusse and the Automaton are clearly the work of the same artist-inventor, one who possessed that rare combination of technical know-how and artistic daring, and who understood the need for an organic relationship between spectacle and narrative. Not that either the spectacle or the narrative are highly evolved at this stage, but, as Méliès may have suspected, the cinema of robots has as long an evolution ahead of it as automata themselves.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
