The Magic
Stop the camera, then start it again. That alone can make a person vanish — the magician Georges Méliès was one of the first to realize the camera was a box of magic. Méliès, who had been a stage conjurer, built a glass-walled studio and mass-produced films that "manufactured reality," using double exposure and stop-motion substitution. Gugusse and the Automaton (1897), placed here, is one of the earliest of these. The clown Gugusse turns a crank, and a doll starts to walk and swing a stick, growing until it's life-size — at which point the doll starts hitting Gugusse back. It's the oldest "walking doll" ever caught on screen, and some researchers call it the first science fiction film. This one film comes with a long story of its own. It went missing for over a hundred years, and turned up in the storage closet of a house in America. A retired high school teacher named Bill McFarland had kept his great-grandfather's travel trunk for twenty years without opening it. His great-grandfather, William Delisle Frisbee, had been a showman at the turn of the twentieth century, touring small Pennsylvania towns with films, magic-lantern slides, and a phonograph. Ten reels of rusted nitrate film were stabilized and scanned by the Library of Congress's preservation center, and returned to the world in 2026. This map has a "magic lantern" entry in its prehistory section. It turns out the trunk of that magic-lantern showman, who helped set the stage for film's arrival, had been holding a piece of film itself for a hundred years. One note: Méliès's most famous film, A Trip to the Moon (1902), isn't lit up here. The widely circulated restoration carries newly composed music, and even though the footage itself is public domain, that particular version isn't free to use as a whole.