Slapstick Modernism: Charley Bowers and Industrial Modernity

William Solomon (SUNY-Buffalo) asks us how vernacular and avant-garde comic practice might function as twinned responses to standardised mass-production and the rationalisation of the workplace. Returning us to the recently rediscovered comic films of Charley Bowers - a pioneer of animated silent film and a proto-surrealist bricoleur lionised by André Breton, Solomon demonstrates how Bowers' absurd machinic assemblages “generate laughter at the expense of the ethos of productive rationalism, in the process of opening up an alternative understanding of machinery as the locus of exuberantly unsettling bursts of joy”.