The reels arrived at the Library of Congress old, rusted, misshapen, and partly crumbling. Before donation, the unidentified nitrate film had circulated through basements, barns, and garages. Technicians began separating and examining what remained, frame by frame.

One image changed the assignment: a black star painted on a pedestal inside a workshop set. It helped identify the footage as Gugusse and the Automaton, a long-lost film by Georges Méliès. On screen, a magician confronts a clockwork figure dressed like Pierrot—the kind of transformation trick Méliès helped turn into the language of early cinema.

The discovery contains its own mechanical rhyme. A film about winding up an automaton survived as inert strips inside damaged metal cans, waiting for another set of hands to make it move again. More than a century after disappearing, the machine and magician stepped back into sequence.