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Agence France-Presse

The battered wooden trunk had been in the family for a century – shifted from attic to barn to garage as it was handed down through the generations. No one knew a cinematic treasure was inside.
That was until retired American teacher Bill McFarland’s curiosity got the better of him.
For the past 20 years, McFarland, 76, has been the keeper of the trunk, which originally belonged to his late great-grandfather who showed silent films to audiences in rural Pennsylvania at the turn of the 20th century.
“It was just this trunk of films that seemed too good to throw away,” McFarland says. “But I had no idea what they were or how to show them.”

He offered them to museums and even tried to sell them through an antique store, whose owner soon told him to take them away after learning vintage nitrate film reels were highly combustible and could explode.
Then last summer, McFarland drove from his home in the northern state of Michigan to the US Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Centre in Culpeper in the southern state of Virginia.
He was in for a surprise – a pleasant one.
Spliced in the middle of one of the 10 reels was a lost short film by Georges Melies, a French cinema pioneer – the first to experiment with fictional narratives and special effects at the very dawn of moving pictures.

The 45-second film, Gugusse and the Automaton, was made in 1897, just two years after the Lumiere Brothers staged the world’s first public screening of a film in Paris.
Melies, a theatrical showman and magician, attended that screening and was inspired to make films of his own. He is most famous for A Trip to the Moon (1902) with its iconic scene of a rocket landing in the eye of the man in the moon.
By a decade later, his filmmaking had fallen out of vogue as the centre of the film world shifted from Europe to America.
Melies ended up as a toy seller in Paris’ Gare Montparnasse railway station, a story that was dramatised in Martin Scorsese’s 2011 film, Hugo. But his legacy endured.


“He was one of the first filmmakers,” says George Willeman, leader of the congressional library’s nitrate film vault. Willeman says the recovered reel is likely a third-generation copy of the Melies original. “And one of the first to experience film piracy.”
In retrospect, piracy was a salvation for film historians as it means that Melies’ work lives on.
Reputedly, he destroyed hundreds of his own negatives, and the celluloid was melted down – and some of it used as raw material to make soldiers’ boots during World War I.
While Gugusse and the Automaton was known to be in Melies’ back catalogue, no one had seen it until McFarland drove it to the library last September.
It features a magician – played by Melies – cranking up an automaton that grows in size and then beats the magician on the head with a stick. The magician retaliates by bashing the automaton with a sledgehammer until it disappears, shrinking through a surprisingly slick series of jump cuts.

“These single frame cuts are really precise for a movie this old, and the gags are timeless,” says Jason Evans Groth, curator of the library’s moving image section, who recounted McFarland popping the trunk of his car with the film reels inside when he arrived in Culpeper.
The film’s discovery has taken McFarland on another journey – learning about the life of his great-grandfather William DeLyle Frisbee.
Born in 1860 in the rural northwest of Pennsylvania, Frisbee was a stocky, moustached man with many strings to his bow.
He grew potatoes, kept bees, made maple syrup and taught school three months each year. In his downtime he would travel by horse and buggy across Pennsylvania and neighbouring states with what he called his “exhibition”: a newfangled Edison phonograph, a magic lantern slide projector and later on, movies.
Well-thumbed pocket diaries describe Frisbee’s travels. “Gave the exhibition at Garland, US$5 receipts, rough crowd,” reads one entry, referring to a community in northwestern Pennsylvania.
“I can only imagine Saturday night, they might have been liquored up a little bit,” McFarland says. “I wonder if there were disappointed customers, or if they were just rowdy? Maybe they were excited at seeing these pictures.”

A century on, and the archivists at the Library of Congress were excited, too.
An alarmed McFarland watched specialists whisk the precious reels to a refrigerated vault, already home to tens of thousands of films from the golden age of Hollywood – and designed to prevent a nitrate-fuelled fire.
“It finally really registered that I had been … carrying a ticking time bomb,” McFarland says.
Library film preservation specialists spent a week restoring the film reel frame by frame and digitising it. The reel had shrunk through age and frayed, but was otherwise in remarkable condition for something stashed in sun-heated attics for years.
It is now a piece of cinema history, viewable on the library’s website.


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Bill McFarland holds his great-grandfather William DeLyle Frisbee’s magic lantern slide projector at his home in Jenison, in the US state of Michigan, in March 2026. Photo: AFP

The box that previously housed Georges Melies’ 1897 silent film Gugusse and the Automaton, at the Packard Campus of the US Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Centre in Culpeper, in the US state of Virginia. Photo: AFP

US Library of Congress’ nitrate film vault technician Courtney Holschuh views the actual film of Georges Melies’ Gugusse and the Automaton at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Centre in the US state of Virginia. Photo: AFP

Georges Melies’ 1897 film Gugusse and the Automaton plays at the Packard Campus cinema of the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Centre. Photo: AFP

Holschuh (left) and vault leader George Willeman unspool nitrate film at the nitrate film vault. Photo: AFP

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Georges Melies’ film Gugusse and the Automaton was long thought lost until a copy was discovered in a trove of vintage nitrate films


Georges Melies’ film Gugusse and the Automaton was long thought lost until a copy was discovered in a trove of vintage nitrate films.


How French cinema pioneer’s lost 1897 film was found in a US family heirloom trunk

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Georges Melies’ film Gugusse and the Automaton was long thought lost until a copy was discovered in a trove of vintage nitrate films

Georges Melies’ film Gugusse and the Automaton was long thought lost until a copy was discovered in a trove of vintage nitrate films