Product Details

• Actors: Bill Daniel, Coaltrain, Herby, Colossus of Roads, The Rambler
• Directors: Bill Daniel
• Format: NTSC
• Region: All Regions
• Number of discs: 1
• Studio: Bill Daniel
• DVD Release Date: August 10, 2007
• Run Time: 56 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000UZQF5Y
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #37,642 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Bill Daniel's homegrown epic is as kinetic and raggedly beautiful as the trains he hopped to make it. Using the search for the origin of a near mythical example of railroad graffiti as a point of departure, Bill made a film about freedom as literal passage across the land." --Jem Cohen

"A hypnotic, rail-rattling tone poem of subversive wayfarer wisdom-- as revealed through the witty, artfull, unexpected delights of railroad graffiti."   -- Sacramento News and Review

"Daniel's film manages a near-perfect union of radical form and radical content, in less than an hour manages to say more about life, art, America and the simple joy of filmmaking than most directors manage in decades." --Neil Young's Film Lounge

Product Description

Who is Bozo Texino? chronicles the search for the source of a ubiquitous and mythic rail graffiti-- a simple sketch of a character with an infinity-shaped hat and the scrawled moniker, "Bozo Texino"-- a drawing seen on railcars for over 80 years.  Daniel's gritty black and white film uncovers a secret society and it's underground universe of hobo and railworker graffiti, and includes interviews with legendary boxcar artists, Coaltrain, Herby, Colossus of Roads, and The Rambler.  Shooting over a 16-year period, Daniel rode freights across the West carrying a Super-8 sound camera and a 16mm Bolex. During his quest he discovered the roots of a folkloric tradition that has gone mostly unnoticed for a century. Taking inspiration from Beat artists Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac, the film functions as both a sub-cultural documentary and a stylized fable on wanderlust and outsider identity.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hobos and Their Logos, January 3, 2008

By 

Maika (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Who Is Bozo Texino? The Secret History of Hobo Graffiti (DVD)

As someone who loves trains and graffiti, and has always been captivated by hobo monikers, watching this beautiful film was like seeing folk tales come to life. Watching those weathered hands reach up and draw the monikers that are so very familiar to me was nothing short of amazing. For as long as I've been watching trains I've been curious about the people behind those wax pencil images so even the title of the movie resonated with me. I have also wondered about Bozo Texino. . .and the Colossus of Roads and Herby and The Rambler and the Whistle Blower and Coaltrain and on and on and on. So many monikers that I've seen so very many times. I gasped each time a different character was drawn out right before my eyes. It just seemed too good to be true. It was almost magical to hear their voices and see those very people talking about their lives and the trains, so many trains. For one hour I was given a spot to sit inside a boxcar and treated to a glimpse of something that is uniquely american without being the least bit jingoistic. It's a whole different world from that which most of us are accustomed to and, with modernization and what some would call progress, it is changing all the time. I think this film is also a love letter to an age that has not yet passed away, but certainly isn't what it once was and the future of which is always uncertain. . .

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Midnite Special, Please Shine Your Light on Me..., December 22, 2007

By 

John A. Joslin (Detroit, Michigan USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Who Is Bozo Texino? The Secret History of Hobo Graffiti (DVD)

Bill Daniel's hellbent for leather railroad flick is not just a breathtaking excursion into the unknown territory just outside of every town where boxcars hurtle and the civilized hum of a compliant citizenry is silenced by the howl of steel rails & the diesel driven percussion of the driving wheels. It is a flat- out adventure picture seemingly informed by a shaman's appreciation of gorgeous natural light and the sublime mysteries it can reveal . Mr. Daniel has invented a sort of filmic sweat lodge - in - motion and once inside we discover a cryptic real life dreamworld peopled by almost unimaginable "others" , an astonishing array of articulate & hardy souls who stubbornly refuse to trade their self respect for any of the consolation prizes the rest of us are well known to settle for.

It's not what's being scrawled on the sides of these trains , but the story of who's doing it that offers a contemporary answer to those rude 20th century questions, " Who is in those boxcars, anyway ? Where are they going ?" and even " How were we supposed to know anything about it ? "

Not too long ago or far away, most respectable folks insisted they never knew , of course , that anybody was on those damned boxcars, meaning the ones forcibly shipping millions of their lately disappeared neighbors off to death camps away from the hustle and bustle of ordinary life in the system they called normal. Well, fast forward to now, and son of a gun if we don't have a rough & tumble smattering of fellow humans seeking out full time living on fast moving railroad boxcars as a sanctuary ... a hard bouncing , freezing- assed , solitary last ditch way to stay out of the spirit killing clutches of the system we up- to- date Homeland dwellers call normal, too.

By the way, Bill Daniel has film chops like the late Robert Johnson had guitar chops. One of a kind. Lyrically lights up every bit of the terrain , never wastes a single lick, and tells a wicked story all the way down the line.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mesmerizing, July 31, 2008

By 

San Luis aka SLO (On the Road, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Who Is Bozo Texino? The Secret History of Hobo Graffiti (DVD)

Bill Daniels' ode to the legend of boxcar moniker Bozo Texino is a mesmerizing picture poem of freight trains and people who have used them as canvases for their not-so-secret art.