Mabel's Biography & Career at a Glance

Mabel Normand’s career is remarkable both within and outside of its historical context. Here you will find anlysis both ways. Below is a pictorial timeline sketching out some key dates and periods in her life. Below that is a short series of principle visualizations drawn from her filmography data.

Biography

The timeline below gives a brief overview of the significant milestones in Mabel Normand’s life and career. Many of these milestones are not just significant to Normand’s own career, but represent trends in the new field of motion picture production. Mabel Normand began working at 16, and was the (credited and uncredited) director on a number of her own films by her early twenties. Through the rapid success of her early career, Normand was one of the most successful silent comics on screen, and in the trade papers she appeared as the poster child for a new industry that could alchemize luck and charm into overnight success, renown, and--most importantly--sizable profit.

Normand's Career at a Glance

The visualizations below give a very general account of Mabel Normand’s work through her filmography and official credits. Even though they are broad, these simple assessments of her known credits by year and format offer an excellent introduction to the general shape of her career. They also present sufficient abstraction from her individual works to allow observations about the extent to which her career was exceptional or emblematic of american silent comedy film production. By zooming out from specific films, directors, and studios we get a change to spot any inflection points without yet concerning ourselves with attribution.

The Majority of Mabel Normand's Film Credits Were as an Actress, but Not All of Them...

It is abundantly clear that Normand’s career was primarily that of an actress, but it is worth noting the other official credits she received. It is no secret today that we assign more authorship and intellectual consideration to the director of a film, but while Normand was working, the boundaries between these roles were less neatly defined -- both on set and in the eyes of the public. Scenarios were often improvised or worked out on the spot. In comedy especially collaboration was key, and bits were more often figured out through physical rehearsal rather than on page. In this way her performance heavy but multi-hyphenate title would be representative of silent comedy, where action and screen personas characterised the genre.

To this point, it is worth noting that credits all share a connection to the construction of a public persona and an interest in shaping the action on screen. As an actress, director, producer, scenario writer or herself, Normand’s role in production would be involved with working through what action would take place, how it would appear, and how she would physically interpret it.

Her Listed Credits Show the Most Range from 1914 to 1918...

By distributing these credits chronologically across the years Normand was making films, we can begin to note trends in her trajectory of her career. Her yearly output rises rapidly in the early 1910s, and by 1913 a growing fraction of her (official) credits on set involve titles other than actress. This fraction grows in the next few years. She (officially) directs or co-directs the most films in 1914, and continues to write or direct in 1915, but by the end of the teens the volume of individual films she makes briefly dips to zero. (Although it must be noted that Mickey, which was arguably her most successful film, was some form of development production or promotion between 1916 and 1918).

In terms of sheer output and diversity of credited roles on set we can place the peak of Normand’s career in the period between approximately 1912 and 1914. The height of which would not return for the rest of her career. This assessment, however, neglects the types of films Normand was making in the years after 1917.

This rapid spike and dip reflects the erratic nature of film production in general. There are too many factors to saying anything conclusive about how her output and credits related to silent comedy at large. Unless we consider other factors.

She Exclusively Makes Features between 1918 and 1923...

If we split the films into short and features, we can see a different story. The volume of titles drop significantly by the late teens, but Normand returns to the screen in several feature films from 1918 to 1923. We also spot a small outlier: a feature in 1914 -- the biography above shares that this was the first feature length comedy film. She makes no films at all in 1924 and 1925 (a period scholars note is characterised by a decline in health and a reputation damaged by scandal) before returning to shorts in 1926-27.

In this sense we might say Normand’s career was emblematic of that development, with the exception that she would return to shorts at the end of her career.

The Average Duration of her Films (Mostly) Trend Upward until 1921

When considering how this line graph pretty much inverts the drop we see in the histograms above, it becomes far more difficult to assess where, if at all, Normand’s career might have peaked. It becomes a matter of where you stake the most importance. (Obviously, there is far too little here to really tell what should be most important).

While her output drops later, the type of films that she does make have longer durations, a trend that mirrors film production in the first few decades. By the late teens feature films were more common and while comedy was slower to catch up. One conclusion about her career we might draw conclusively is that its end, from about 1925 onward, displays a decline in output and duration, potentially signaling a decline in success. Even this, however, remains difficult to conclude without more detail.

From this information we have a great way into more questions about Normand’s filmography.

We might ask:

• ~What other dimensions of Normand’s career in 1917 and 1926, and how did they relate to the types of films she made?

• ~ What impacted Normand's credit on films over time?

• ~ What choices or larger trends extended the duration of Normand’s films over the course of her career?

• ~ And of course how, if at all, were any of these shifts in her career emblematic of production trends at the time, are these shifts evidence Normand’s career was an exceptional case, or will the data and methods limit our ability to tell?

Some (but certainly not all) the answers may come from the data explored in the following sections.