Metrop­o­lis, For­bid­den Plan­et, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Blade Run­ner, The Ter­mi­na­tor, Short Cir­cuit, Robo­Cop, Ghost in the Shell, The Iron Giant, WALL‑E, Ex Machi­na: there is a par­al­lel his­to­ry of cin­e­ma to be told entire­ly through its robots. That such a his­to­ry must begin with the work of Georges Méliès may not come as a sur­prise, giv­en that he invent­ed so many of the tech­niques of sci­ence-fic­tion film­mak­ing. But until recent­ly, we did­n’t actu­al­ly know that the cin­e­ma pio­neer who “invent­ed every­thing” ever put a robot onscreen. The evi­dence turned up among a col­lec­tion of “old and bat­tered” reels of film that 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.”

So writes the Library of Con­gress’ Neely Tuck­er, who goes on to describe the action of one of the films involv­ing “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 Georges Méliès at his Star Film com­pa­ny.”

Méliès him­self plays the magi­cian, who “winds up an automa­ton dressed like the famous clown Pier­rot, which is stand­ing on a pedestal. Once wound up, the clown begins to beat the magi­cian with his walk­ing stick. The magi­cian retal­i­ates by get­ting a huge sledge­ham­mer and bash­ing the automa­ton over the head, with each blow seem­ing to shrink it in half, until it is just a small doll.”

In just 45 sec­onds, this sim­ple film would have aston­ished audi­ences back in 1897 — and indeed retains the pow­er to impress, pro­vid­ed you con­sid­er that none of the tech­niques to real­ize its effects were wide­ly known before Méliès attempt­ed them. He did so five years before ‘A Trip to the Moon,’ a huge­ly ambi­tious cin­e­mat­ic endeav­or by com­par­i­son, and by far the sin­gle film that best rep­re­sents his lega­cy.’ Yet it and Gugusse and the Automa­ton are clear­ly the work of the same artist-inven­tor, one who pos­sessed that rare com­bi­na­tion of tech­ni­cal know-how and artis­tic dar­ing, and who under­stood the need for an organ­ic rela­tion­ship between spec­ta­cle and nar­ra­tive. Not that either the spec­ta­cle or the nar­ra­tive are high­ly evolved at this stage, but, as Méliès may have sus­pect­ed, the cin­e­ma of robots has as long an evo­lu­tion ahead of it as automa­ta them­selves.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch 194 Films by Georges Méliès, the Film­mak­er Who “Invent­ed Every­thing” (All in Chrono­log­i­cal Order)

How Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon Became the First Sci-Fi Film & Changed Cin­e­ma For­ev­er (1902)

The Word “Robot” Orig­i­nat­ed in a Czech Play in 1921: Dis­cov­er Karel Čapek’s Sci-Fi Play R.U.R. (a.k.a. Rossum’s Uni­ver­sal Robots)

Fritz Lang First Depict­ed Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence on Film in Metrop­o­lis (1927), and It Fright­ened Peo­ple Even Then

Watch “The Birth of the Robot,” Len Lye’s Sur­re­al 1935 Stop-Motion Ani­ma­tion

Watch the Sci-Fi Short Film “I’m Not a Robot”: Win­ner of a 2025 Acad­e­my Award

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

A vast, mis­er­able pro­le­tari­at squan­ders its days in mean­ing­less toil. Soci­ety is under the con­trol of ultra-wealthy busi­ness mag­nates. In order to paci­fy the under­class, the rul­ing class pins its hopes on a tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion: arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Wel­come to the year 2026, as envi­sioned in Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis. When the film pre­miered, not long after 1926 had come to an end, that date would have seemed arbi­trar­i­ly futur­is­tic. Now, of course, it’s the present, though our world may nowhere look quite as styl­ish as the Art Deco dystopia craft­ed at great expense and an unprece­dent­ed scale of pro­duc­tion by Lang and com­pa­ny. Yet when we watch Metrop­o­lis today, the ele­ments that now seem pre­scient stand out more than the fan­tas­ti­cal ones.

The new short doc­u­men­tary from DW above exam­ines the mak­ing and lega­cy of Metrop­o­lis, pay­ing spe­cial atten­tion to its con­sid­er­able influ­ence on much of the sci­ence-fic­tion and dystopi­an cin­e­ma since. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Blade Run­ner, Ter­mi­na­tor 2, Madon­na’s “Express Your­self” video: these are just a few of the pro­duc­tions that take no great pains to hide — and in some cas­es, even empha­size — their debt to Lang’s vision.

Ver­tig­i­nous, inten­sive­ly illu­mi­nat­ed, infra­struc­ture-webbed sky­scraper canyons and labor­ers at once manip­u­lat­ing and being manip­u­lat­ed by over­sized clock­work are only the most obvi­ous images that have come down through decades of pop­u­lar cul­ture. For the ori­gin of the wild-haired “mad sci­en­tist” sur­round­ed by tubes and coils, look no fur­ther than Metrop­o­lis’ Rot­wang.

Much could also be writ­ten — and indeed, much already has been writ­ten — about the lega­cy of Rot­wang’s inven­tion, the robot woman who takes on the like­ness of a work­ing-class hero­ine. Beyond the ground­break­ing nature of its design, Metrop­o­lis has also retained atten­tion after near­ly a cen­tu­ry thanks to the folk­loric, even myth­i­cal res­o­nances of its sto­ry. It may be tech­ni­cal­ly implau­si­ble, at least from our point of view, to imag­ine large-scale automa­tion coex­ist­ing with large-scale employ­ment, how­ev­er dire the jobs, but age-old nar­ra­tive under­cur­rents allow even mod­ern audi­ences to sus­pend dis­be­lief (a phe­nom­e­non that has­n’t gone unno­ticed by the mak­ers of more recent sci-fi and fan­ta­sy block­busters). We may not live in quite the 2026  that Metrop­o­lis puts onscreen, but in some sense, we do inhab­it the world it made.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 1927 Film Metrop­o­lis Cre­at­ed a Dystopi­an Vision of What the World Would Look Like in 2026 — and It Hits Close to Home

Fritz Lang First Depict­ed Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence on Film in Metrop­o­lis (1927), and It Fright­ened Peo­ple Even Then

Fritz Lang Invents the Video Phone in Metrop­o­lis (1927)

Read the Orig­i­nal 32-Page Pro­gram for Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis (1927)

How Movies Cre­at­ed Their Spe­cial Effects Before CGI: Metrop­o­lis, 2001: A Space Odyssey & More

H. G. Wells Pans Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis in a 1927 Movie Review: It’s “the Sil­li­est Film”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.