Allow me to sell you some cool cinema history merch for Christmas!

The GROSS merch store is on Redbubble. There are dozens of designs - most of which are not to do with the movies at all - but here are a some of the cinema-related items. If you buy them you’re supporting my project to tell a materialist history of Hollywood through the top-grossing movies of all time.

Originally intended to be the first in a cycle - a plan killed off, let’s face it, by the arrival of sound - it covers only the beginning of Napoléon’s world-historical career: by end of this five-hour movie (you can watch Kevin’s Brownlow’s beautiful 1981 reconstruction on Amazon Prime and there’s a Blu-Ray) he’s barely reached Italy and has just been appointed General.

The first two designs use stills from the mind-blowing three-screen sequence at the end of the movie. The third one features the film’s terrifying and always noble Robespierre, played by Edmond Van Daële, in his signature shades (it looks pretty cool on a coffee mug). You can get all the designs on t-shirts, mugs, stickers and dozens of other products via Redbubble (they manufacture and ship worldwide and seem to be pretty good value).

I’m pretty sure that if she’d lived, American avant-garde archetype Maya Deren would have directed a whole sequence of brilliant screwball comedies for Warner Brothers and then gone on to found a studio and invent a category of blockbuster movies, like Steven Spielberg or someone. But she died at 44. This design, using the key motif from her best-known film Meshes of the Afternoon, is available printed on, well, practically everything. I included Deren’s collected writings in my post about the movie books I rely on.

Groucho, as Rufus T. Firefly, is appointed President of Freedonia (a small nation on the model of Ruritania). The fantasy here is that, when he was in the United States, Firefly would spend his time at the Freedonian consulate in Los Angeles, his favourite, located under the hat at the Brown Derby. I think the design works best on a coffee mug but you can get it on dozens of other items, natch!