For decades Charley Bowers was silent comedy’s Nowhere Man – so forgotten that when his comedies began resurfacing in the 1970’s no one had the slightest idea who he was. So unique that he didn’t have any followers, Bowers was his own genre. Way ahead of his time in stop-motion animation, in shorts such as Now You Tell One he used it to make the impossible come true before our eyes. Reality gets sorely bent in his films – plants grow so fast that they up the farmer’s pantleg and impale him in mid-air, or, as in Egged On (also 1926), eggs hatch into miniature Model-Ts. Bowers, who looked like the love-child of Buster Keaton and Larry Semon, made about 20 of these little gems over three years, but then the arrival of sound stalled his upward rise. By the time that he passed away from a long illness in 1946, he had already been forgotten. Lost for decades, many of his shorts have resurfaced and started the ball rolling on the examination and appreciation of his singular vision.

Steve Massa