A Michigan man’s family heirlooms have led to the re-discovery of a more than 100-year-old film by an early pioneer of cinema.
Jenison resident Bill McFarland describes his great-grandfather's old storage trunks as a metaphorical "albatross" that had been around his neck for many years.
"The one trunk was all films, and the other trunk was projection equipment that have been in garages and my barn and cellars, and I have moved it so many times," he said.
His great-grandfather named W.D. Frisbee was somewhat of a jack-of-all-trades in the late 19thand early 20thcenturies, teaching in a one-room schoolhouse, farming, doing odd jobs and traveling around Pennsylvania and neighboring states showing movies from the just nascent film industry.
"His first show, he calls it, 'gave the exhibition,' or showed, 'I showed in Coraopolis,' or 'I showed in Sugar Grove.' It hand-painted glass slides that just were on kind of a Rolodex with a gas-lit projector," McFarland explained.
After Frisbee died in 1938, his trunks were passed down from his daughter to her daughter to eventually McFarland. He never knew what was on the nearly dozen film reels from his ancestor’s collection, but felt they could be something important.
"I hate reading those stories where there was a lost film and somebody had it, and then they threw it away," he said.
So, after a move last year, he decided it was finally time to find them a new home.
McFarland ended up getting in touch with the Library of Congress and driving the trunks down to Virginia last September.
Curator of the Library's moving image section Jason Evans Groth was there when he dropped off the films.
"I noticed that one of the reels had what I recognized as a Thomas Edison film on it, and it was the moment where I was like, oh, this might be something maybe a little bit different than what a routine gift might be," Evans Groth said.
The library staff had a similar reaction when they noticed a motif of early film pioneer George Méliès on one of the film strips. The French filmmaker was one of cinema’s earliest special-effects pioneers.
He made the iconic “A Trip to the Moon” silent film and was a huge inspiration for the movie "Hugo."
"They're looking at it through the light, and they see a scene that features a star, which was featured in a lot of his films. His film company is called Star Films," Evans Groth said.
What they found on the reel was astonishing: a film thought to be lost to time.
In a 45-second silent short, a man played by Méliès winds up a mechanical figure, it grows bigger and bigger until at full size, it whacks the man with a stick.
He retaliates by pulling it off its platform and smashing it until it becomes smaller and smaller into nothing.
"This is probably the first sci-fi film and likely the first to ever feature what we now call a robot," Evans Groth said.
It's called "Gugusse and the Automaton" and was made in 1897. Despite its age, Evans Groth says the message is still relevant today.
"This is a guy fighting technology that overtakes him after he creates it, and then he has to destroy it."
How it got to Frisbee remains a mystery. Digital film preservation specialist Patrick Queen says there’s evidence along the edges of the film, the perforations, that it had been transferred over several times.
"You can tell by the perfs that it's different eras of film, film duplicated on film duplicated on film," he said.
Evans Groth says that’s not surprising because there wasn’t any copyright law really governing films at the time especially since "Gugusse and the Automaton" came from Europe.
"Even in the late 19th century, there were people like, sort of in the gray market, getting these things and then selling them in the the back pages of your local newspaper, like, 'Start your own film road show.'"
Since the film went online at the Library of Congress’ website at the end of February, it's been viewed tens of thousands of times. Queen says many people have reached out to him about the discovery.
"It's continuing to sort of find some momentum. I hope it keeps finding momentum. I don't think we've even stopped yet at getting this on eyeballs," Queen said.
Evans Groth adds it's been an honor to be involved with bringing this film to light.
"I am obsessed with the magic of transferring one medium to another," he said.
"Especially because it's going to make it more accessible to an audience, but also just to see this content that was, you know, what I always say is like, kind of stuck in an analog jail."
McFarland says the fact that this film is still connecting people today is something he thinks his great-grandfather would appreciate.
"I read his journals, and I realize that rascal, it wasn't so much the technology as that he got to stay at somebody else's house every night he showed. He got to meet all these people!" McFarland said.
Library of Congress staff are still working on cataloguing and restoring the rest of McFarland’s family collection with tentative plans to screen all of the reels for him when they’re done.
