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191 A little more than seventy years ago, in 1937, the French surrealist André Breton jotted down a crib sheet for a new history of film comedy, inspired by a screening of Charley Bowers’s sound short It’s a Bird (1930). A comedy about one man’s discovery of a “metal-eating bird,” the film prompted Breton to a fresh conception of slapstick’s role in the history of film. To the extent that cinema was a medium of extremes, Breton averred, its encounter with slapstick had been inevitable and primary : “The first comedies of Mack Sennett, certain films of Chaplin, the unforgettable Fatty and Picratt [Al St. John] began the trajectory that culminated in those banquets of the midnight sun, Million Dollar Legs and Animal Crackers, and those excursions into the caverns of the mind, Un chien andalou and L’âge d’or by Buñuel and Dali.” But, even in such company, Bowers’s It’s a Bird was a turning point—a film that “projects us for the first time to the heart of a black star, our eyes opened to the flat sensory distinction between the real and the fantastic.”1 Fast-forward thirty years. Raymond Borde, founder of the Toulouse Film Library, recovers some French release prints of unidentified silent comedies starring the mysterious “Bricolo”—the French nickname, it transpires, for the same Charley Bowers who had so impressed Breton. The rediscovery of this “lost” comedian is announced in Borde’s 1967 article “Le mystère bricolo,” from Midi minuit fantastique, where 10 The Art of Diddling Slapstick, Science, and Antimodernism in the Films of Charley Bowers Rob King The Utopian calling, indeed, seems to have some kinship with that of the inventor in modern times. . . . There is here some affinity with children’s games; but also with the outsider’s gift for seeing over-familiar realities in a fresh and unaccustomed way, along with the radical simplifications of the maker of models. —Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future 192 Rob King the comedian is described as an “imperturbable inventor” who actualizes “delirious conceptions . . . obeying nothing but the logic of a dream.”2 The British film critic Raymond Durgnat next takes up Bowers’s cause in his 1969 study The Crazy Mirror: Hollywood Comedy and the American Image, describing the comedian as “one of the silent cinema’s innumerable research problems” and complaining that even the titles of his movies were, in some cases, unknown—powerful evidence of the obscurity in which Bowers had come to languish.3 Forward to the present: we now know the titles, but, still, it is as a research problem that Bowers’s legacy is defined. Who was this comedian who found his greatest champion in a European surrealist before lapsing into decades of obscurity? What sense can be made of a career that took Bowers from the forefront of film animation in the 1910s, as director on the Mutt and Jeff series, to writer, star, and producer of “novelty” films combining live-action slapstick and stop-motion animation for FBO (Film Booking Office) and Educational Pictures in the 1920s, to his final years as a children’s illustrator in the 1930s and 1940s? The problem is not only that Bowers is unknown but that his career followed a path whose logic belongs to so seemingly alien a cultural imaginary—truly, as Borde put it, a “dream logic,” binding invention to animation to slapstick, where the boundaries separating science from sleight of hand, mechanics from magic appear so imperfectly fixed. It is my contention that the “Bowers problem” nonetheless opens on to larger issues in the cultural history of American comedy, for Charley Bowers was hardly the only comic filmmaker whose career traced such a path. One thinks obviously of Buster Keaton, a self-confessed “mechanically inclined” boy, whose slapstick form was stamped with the imprint of a fantastical mechanics; of Snub Pollard, whose comedies for Hal Roach similarly exploited little inventions, systems of pulleys and strings for household tasks; of the comedian Larry Semon, a former cartoonist, like Bowers, with a penchant for costly trick stunts; or even of Walter Wright, a director for Mack Sennett in the 1910s whose experiments with incamera effects and sensation scenes won him a reputation as “the Keystone’s ‘trick’ director,” before he departed filmmaking for a career as an inventor in the 1920s.4 Bridging the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, this fascination with invention and entertainment (of invention as...

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