GROSS/6 1918 - a double bill: pathos and perfect slapstick followed by a mind-expanding account of the Russian revolution

Mabel Normand and Vladimir Lenin, together at last.

Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.

MICKEY, F. RICHARD JONES, MABEL NORMAND FEATURE FILM COMPANY, 1918, 93 MINUTES.
ANNIVERSARY OF THE REVOLUTION, DZIGA VERTOV, MOSCOW FILM COMMITTEE, 1918, 119 MINUTES.

So, in the second and fifth of the films I’ve reviewed here, from 1914 and 1917, we met the first America’s Sweetheart (for there have been several), Mary Pickford. Now we’ll meet the greatest female comic of the early cinema and a kind of tragic mirror to Pickford - Mabel Normand.

We’ll also meet a genius from another tradition all together, perhaps as far removed from Normand’s generous comedic charm as it’s possible to get in the cinema - Dziga Vertov, the genius who brought us Man with a Movie Camera.

All the (probably fairly unreliable) lists I’m relying on for this journey through the top-grossing films of all time list Mabel Normand’s ‘Mickey’, directed by F. Richard Jones, as the top film of 1918 but one has another, with an implausible gross of $9,685, in the top spot: ‘Anniversary of the Revolution’ (Годовщина революции) by Soviet era genius Dziga Vertov. I can’t explain what this propaganda film is doing on the list - was it the biggest movie of the year in the communist world?

Anyway, it’s clear that ‘Mickey’ was the real commercial hit here, but I’m very happy to introduce the first film from outside the emerging Hollywood system to our top-grossing list. First, though, the genuine blockbuster.

Mickey - a prequel for Greta Gerwig’s whole acting career

I’m just going to say it. I love this film. Normand, born Amabel Ethelreid Normand in 1893, is a rubber-faced, double-jointed physical comedy genius who can act (she’d also been a director for years and produced this film). In Mickey, a grown-up, 93-minute feature, there’s pathos that never tips over into mawkishness and all the standard devices of the melodramas of the period are deployed cleverly and with irony. There’s a sophisticated awareness of the form - I’m prepared to swear on a bible that Normand winks directly into the lens at least once, throwing the whole artifice of the thing in the air spellbindingly.

Jones gives us gentle slapstick, with stunts performed by Normand herself (she’s school of Mack Sennett). She hangs from a roof, falls from a window, leaps onto a horse, shins up drainpipes and trees with abandon. The cast - including well-known native American comic actor Minnie Devereux (credited here, with the casual racism of the day, as Minnie Ha-Ha) as a resourceful housekeeper and the man who would later become Mabel’s husband Lew Cody as cad Reggie Drake - is universally brilliant. Acting is breezy, always self-conscious and slyly comic, even in dramatic scenes (this must have been a riotous shoot).

Mickey’s story is the fairytale Cinderella transposed to the folklore United States of worked-out gold mines and snooty East coast plutocrats. There’s a scene where Normand’s Mickey, recently shipped in from her uncle’s failing mine to the Long Island mansion of her aunt’s family, is set to work sweeping the hall of the great house. She gives us pure joy and mischief with the insouciance and the absolute formal discipline of Buster Keaton (turns out I wasn’t the first to spot the Greta Gerwig of Frances Ha here). That she is Keaton’s equal, even Chaplin’s, quickly becomes obvious. That she is not as well known is a tragedy (but there’s plenty of actual tragedy to blame for that too).

Anniversary of the Revolution - a prequel for the whole Soviet Union

I’m going to say it here too. I love this film. It comes from another world, of course. Dziga Vertov (born David Abelevich Kaufman in Ukraine in 1896), who was still eight or nine years from principal photography on his masterpiece Man With a Movie Camera, was 23. He’d been a year younger at the time of the October Revolution. This whirlwind montage of newsreel footage from the period between the February revolution and the beginning of the civil war was his first feature.

Thirty prints of the film were made in 1918 and they were worn to shreds doing daily business on the agit-trains - the hypermodern steam-powered travelling propaganda machines that toured the country during the civil war. It seems unlikely anyone was paying to see it so how you’d calculate a gross for this one is a mystery to me - but I’d love to know if it had a cinematic life in the West. Were people paying a nickel or sixpence to see this movie in New York or London?

The film was considered lost for a century, anyway, so no one saw it in full after about 1919. It’s a documentary that’s almost two hours long, assembled from 3,000 metres of newsreel - a lot of it was probably shot and edited by Vertov on its first outing too - he’d been a newsreel monkey for the Moscow Film Committee for the whole period. It’s been called the first feature-length documentary. That seems plausible - it was worn out and forgotten a couple of years before Nanook of the North came out. I’m sure it’s the first feature film assembled in this self-conscious way using many others as source material.

Vertov’s big edit is a vivid prequel for the Soviet Union. In his film we’re in a country still boiling with revolutionary fervour, about to fight for its survival - against multiple foes and without an ally in the world, still years from the decades-long retrenchment and retreat from its ideals, ten years before the routine brutality of the Stalin years began and 20 years before the terror.

These are the men and women who brought into being by the force of their will - and against the greatest odds imaginable - capitalism’s only ever viable alternative. They stand around blinking in the sunshine, smoking, getting in and out of ramshackle cars, shouting from improvised platforms. They’re awkward, probably exhilerated and frightened. Improvising a new nation in real time, with excitement and without the knowledge that it would collapse into pain and grief only a few years later.

So the material, by definition, is breathtaking - every figure of any importance from the whole revolutionary period is here, all the people you’ve heard of - Lenin, Trotsky, Kerensky, Kamenev, Lunacharsky, Kollontai - plus dozens of others, many soon forgotten. They’re usually entering or leaving a building - presumably for another interminable committee meeting or a workers’ assembly - or smoking in a courtyard.

But we also see the marches and protests, the vast gatherings on Moscow and Petersburg streets, the milling and circulating proletariat - the revolutionary subject coming into being in squares, on bridges, in railway yards. And some extraordinary, heartstopping events. On the Field of Mars, the dead of the October revolution are interred in a vast mass grave, one coffin after another stacked in a neat pattern while men with clipboards record names and locations. There are riverboats, cars, trucks, armoured cars - we’re conscious of the vastness of the territory, of the pace of events. Trotsky addresses a crowd from a train on his way to the front in the civil war. He stands on the bridge of a river boat, posing like a matinee idol (what exactly is he wearing here? A leather sailor suit?).

Men wave their hats, stand around, staring at the newsreel camera, open-mouthed. Kids run around with school holiday abandon. Soldiers and policemen stride around trying to assert their authority. Horses and dogs are everywhere. What’s the name for the shiver of awe that watching these extraordinary scenes causes? For the uncanny collision of intimacy and unbridgeable distance that these smiling, frowning, laughing, shouting faces produces? There honestly isn’t a second of this film that’s not astonishing or surprising.

Right before your eyes

Vertov, our 22 year-old, in assembling material from hundreds of individual newsreels (aspect ratios vary throughout, it’s chaotic), was innnovating in real time. There’s obviously no consistency as to shot angle or composition. Sometimes framing is wildly off, sometimes the operator swings back and forth across a scene, as if to make sure they didn’t miss anything on the first pass. Scenes begin and end ragged, unresolved.

One of the mind-expanding joys of the thing is the way Vertov cuts the footage of these important figures (many men with big beards and/or big hats) - usually captured on the stairs up to a building, against the gloom of an entrance. He resists the obvious edit - the one that any naive human would grasp at - to top-and-tail the scenes neatly, to remove the comings and goings, the quick departures, the rushing off into the gloom. So in these scenes we have something more open-ended, provisional (something quite YouTube about the way these shots trail off, in fact).

In these cuts Vertov somehow captures the indeterminate nature of the wild Soviet experiment (feel like I ought to make my own edit of all these little endings) and in so doing invents a new form. Every self-conscious film with an ironic take on the material - every doc that makes the process visible, that involves the creator, allows its making to bleed into the narrative - has its origin in these decisions, in Vertov’s willingness to leave the end of the shot in the edit.

• I watched the Vertov film on YouTube. The assembly of this print, from recovered scraps, is a story in itself.

• The Mabel Normand is also on YouTube (although I feel like there must be a better print somewhere, possibly with a real score).

• Normand’s own story is heartbreaking and she was gone at 36.

• If you’ve seen Adam Curtis’s long, contemplative montage from the other end of the Soviet journey you’ll recognise Vertov’s style.

• Here's a list of all the top-grossing films since 1913 and here's my Letterboxd list.

• This is the top-grossing list that inexplicably includes Anniversary of the Revolution.