The old wooden chest had been in the family for a century, moved from the attic to the barn, from the barn to the garage. Nobody knew it contained a treasure trove of French cinema.
Nobody until Bill McFarland, a retired teacher and great-grandson of a projectionist from rural Pennsylvania, US, discovered some old films that_”seemed too precious to throw away”,_ he recalls. But the septuagenarian “had no idea what they represented” or how to view them.
So he turned to the archivists at the Library of Congress in Culpeper, Virginia. This was the start of a long process of restoring and identifying the films, which were badly damaged in places.
Finally, the verdict dropped: One of the reels contained in the chest was a long lost film by Georges Méliès.
Entitled Gugusse et l’automate (literally: Gugusse and the Automaton – although ‘gugusse’ is French slang for ‘joker’ or ‘idiot’), this 45-second film was made in 1897 – just two years after the Lumière brothers’ first film projection. The screening at the time was attended by Méliès, an illusionist who would later become famous for his experimentation with the first special effects (or “trick films”) in cinema.
Georges Méliès was born into a wealthy family in Paris in 1861, but with little interest in his father’s shoe business, he abandoned the family business to devote himself to magic.
Fascinated by the cinematograph, he made over 520 films, including the famous 1902 film Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), considered to be one of the first science fiction films.
When Walt Disney was presented with the Legion of Honour title in 1936, he said that Méliès, now regarded as the precursor of film trickery, and his fellow pioneer Emile Cohl “discovered the means of placing poetry within the reach of the man in the street.”
The iconic image of when the capsule lands in the moon’s eye in A Trip to the Moon remains one of the most famous images in the history of cinema.