Charley Bowers: The Rediscovery of an American Comic Genius [DVD]

Who is Charley Bowers? The inventor of the no-slipping banana skin, unbreakable eggs, and cat-pushing trees! At the end of the 1920s, this unknown genius created and directed a score of cinematic burlesques filled with surrealist imagination, crammed with fantastic sights and animated puppets, among which the most delicious include Egged On, Fatal Footstep and Now You Tell One. His body of work is unique, though the astonishing course his career took has been chronicled by few and left him as one of the more enigmatic figures of American cinema. After a childhood spent with the circus, he became interested in animated drawing, adapting comic strips for the cinema including the Mutt and Jeff series created by Bud Fisher. Advances in animation which developed during this period explain the astonishing illusions which emerged in these comedic shorts. In the 1930s he directed It's a Bird, his first sound film. Bowers returned to animation for advertising films, in particular the first short film by Joseph Losey, the oil-commissioned Pete Roleum and His Cousins, while also continuing his puppet films. He died in 1946, completely forgotten. To this day, 11 of the 20 short comedies are still considered lost. At the end of the 1960s, vault discoveries provided more of his story and three of the exhumed films were shown in 1976 at the Annecy Animated Film Festival, where they were met with enthusiasm. After 1992, worldwide research retrieved surviving prints of the missing films wit