The Library of Congress Just Found One of George Méliès’ Lost Movies

At the dawn of the 20^th century, long before the special-effects spectacles of James Cameron or Steven Spielberg existed, audiences were dazzled by the fantastical films of Georges Méliès. At a time when other cinematic pioneers like the Lumière Brothers and the men who worked under Thomas Edison were focused on using the motion picture to document reality, Méliès, a former stage magician, became fixated on the possibilities this new medium offered for the kind of cinematic slight of hand used in his “trick films.”

Through early editing techniques like jump-cuts and time-lapse photography, Méliès’ fantastical images helped construct the language of popular cinema as we know it today. His 1896 work The House of the Devil, for example, is regarded as the first horror movie, while his 1902 science-fiction fantasy A Trip to the Moon created one of the most enduring images in all of cinema: a disgruntled Moon-man with a rocket poking out of his eye.

But while this pioneering filmmaker produced more than 500 films in his lifetime, only around 200 are known to have survived into our modern age.

Since early cinema was often viewed as a mere frivolity, there wasn’t much effort made to preserve early film prints, and even if with the best will in the world, nitrate film prints were extremely fragile and flammable. In the U.S. alone, according to an estimate by the Library of Congress, “70 percent of feature-length silent films…have been completely lost to time and neglect.”

For its part, the Library of Congress has made efforts since 1942 to preserve America’s cinematic heritage, an effort supercharged in the late 1980s when Representatives Robert J. Mrazek and Syndey R. Yates introduced the National Film Preservation Act, establishing within the Library of Congress a Film Preservation Board and the National Film Registry, the latter of which selects 25 films every year deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” for preservation, ranging from 1893’s Blacksmithing Scene to 2008’s The Dark Knight.

“From an early age, movies had a profound impact on my life and helped to shape who I became,” the former Congressman told Popular Mechanics about his advocacy for film preservation in the Library of Congress. “It was an honor to help protect the work of film artists as they originally conceived it.”

In January of 2026, the Library of Congress announced its latest batch of National Film Registry inductees, including The Karate Kid and The Grand Budapest Hotel. But in February, they made another surprise announcement, one that nobody could have seen coming: They had found one of Georges Méliès’ lost science-fiction films, the much sought-after Gugusse et l’automate.

The discovery arrived inside a box of roughly 10 “old and battered” film reels that had been “shuttled around from basements to barns to garages and had just been dropped off at the Library.” The donor was Bill McFarland, whose great-grandfather William Delisle Frisbee had been a traveling showman of sorts, who “drove his horse and buggy from town to town to dazzle the locals with a projector and some of the world’s first moving pictures.”

As the Library of Congress’ archival technicians carefully examined the collection, they noticed a 45-second film of two figures getting up to hijinks. Upon closer inspection, they realized the first figure was the magician-character Gugusse and the other figure was an automaton. The technicians realized that they had just uncovered a long-lost Méliès work—1897’s Gugusse et l’automate—that was revolutionary for its portrayal of the first robot in cinema history.

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Méliès was fascinated by the concept of mechanical men, or automatons, as they were called before the invention of the word “robot” in 1920. These machine men were such an important theme in the French cinematographer’s work that they factor heavily into the Oscar-winning Martin Scorsese film about Méliès, 2011’s Hugo.

Gugusse et l’automate was much discussed among science-fiction fans for nearly a century, particularly because it long seemed that this futuristic vision of a machine man had been wiped away forever in order to feed the war machine: Many of Méliès’ films were lost forever when their prints were melted down for their silver and celluloid during World War 1.

While silent cinema and sci-fi fans alike will no doubt rejoice at the news of the film’s rediscovery, music and film historian Charlie Judkins spoke to PopMech about the bittersweet confluence of feelings that often accompanies a rediscovery like this. “Discovering a piece of lost or neglected media is always both exciting and somewhat sad—sad that the work did not find its audience in its time, but of course exciting that we have the opportunity to fix that and finally give this overlooked art the attention it’s long deserved.”

Judkins, whose Unrecorded Songs Project seeks to share never-before-recorded songs from the turn of the century, and who has provided new musical accompaniment for an array of silent film restorations for institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, stressed the importance of what these older, oft-forgotten works can offer a modern age:

“When modern audiences have the opportunity to experience these works, not only does it offer a window into the songwriting (or filmmaking) style of the time, but also a reminder that, as today, not all great art receives its proper attention during the lifetime of the artist responsible.”

That was almost the case of Méliès, who was impoverished after WWI and completely absent from the cinematic world of the 1920s. Managing a small toy shop in Paris, he was largely forgotten. But in the final years of his life, there was a revival of interest in his work. A journalist sought him out and encouraged him to write a memoir, and what works of his that had survived were shown in a gala retrospective at Paris’ Salle Pleyel in 1929.

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Now, nearly a century after that gala, and thanks to the dogged efforts of a horse and buggy projectionist, his great-grandson, and a governmental organization an ocean away from Méliès’ home country, his work has seen yet another revival.

“To see those lost images restored to life,” concluded Congressman Mrazek, “is both exciting and a testament to the importance of the Film Preservation Board and the National Film Registry.”

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Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.