One of the most exciting things to me about watching the public domain roar back to life as older works have finally been allowed to start falling out of copyright has been seeing more and more movies that were believed lost turn up in complete or near-complete copies. My wallet cries tears of frustration every time Redwood Creek Films offers a new Kickstarter campaign, but thanks to them I’ve gotten to see so many films that people largely believed we would never see again. And not a small amount of this surge in rediscovered film is because people can actually share these films without worrying about getting a copyright claim against them.
But there are also some older films out there that have remained lost long after they’ve become public domain, anyway. Sometimes it’s because a collector has been keeping their copy under wraps (rare film collectors, in particular, are notorious for not wanting others to know what exactly they have in their library). And sometimes it’s because the person who has the movie has no idea what they’ve been holding onto. Just such a case seems to have surfaced recently at the Library of Congress when they went through a small box of old, rusted tins that had been dropped off as a donation.
They 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. There were about 10 of them and they were rusted. Some were misshapen. The nitrate film stock had crumbled to bits on some; other strips were stuck together.
The librarians peeled them apart and gently looked them over, frame by frame.
And there, on one film, was a black star painted onto a pedestal in the center of the screen. The action was of 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 George Méliès at his Star Film company.
And so, thanks to the LOC’s efforts preserving it, you can now watch the minute of previously-lost film below!