128-year-old film in US library claimed as world's first robot movie

A recently rediscovered 1897 silent French film, Gugusse et l’Automate, directed by pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès, has been identified by the US Library of Congress as the oldest known movie to feature a robot-like mechanical character. Previously, the 1927 film Metropolis and the 1920 play R.U.R. were considered the earliest depictions of robots in cinema. Gugusse et l’Automate predates these works by decades, portraying a clown interacting with a mechanical man, or automaton, a popular 19th-century clockwork machine that served as a precursor to modern robots. The film was thought lost for over a century until a damaged 10-reel copy was found in 2025, cataloged under Méliès’s Star Film Company. This discovery redefines the roots of robot imagery and science fiction in film, showing that mechanical beings were already part of popular culture before the term “robot” was coined in 1920. Méli