Fabrice Luchini, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Lauréna Thellier, Juliette Binoche, Raph, Manon Royère as the Van Peteghems in Bruno Dumont's wild Slack Bay (Ma Loute)
"I think each one of us has in us both some Brufort (Thierry Lavieville and Brandon Lavieville) and some Van Peteghem (see photo above)."
Bruno Dumont's latest, the musical Jeannette, L'Enfance De Jeanne d'Arc, will screen at the Cannes Film Festival where his Li'l Quinquin and Slack Bay (Ma Loute) had their world premieres. In our conversation the director/screenwriter discussed the character of the brother, Paul Claudel (Jean-Luc Vincent) in Camille Claudel 1915, the lens of the grotesque, pushing the grandparents in Li'l Quinquin to go beyond what is expected and how "grace is really within the reach of all of us."
Bruno Dumont on Camille Claudel 1915: "I think for me, using the grotesque, it's almost as though it were a lens.
"I think each one of us has in us both some Brufort (Thierry Lavieville and Brandon Lavieville) and some Van Peteghem (see photo above)."
Bruno Dumont's latest, the musical Jeannette, L'Enfance De Jeanne d'Arc, will screen at the Cannes Film Festival where his Li'l Quinquin and Slack Bay (Ma Loute) had their world premieres. In our conversation the director/screenwriter discussed the character of the brother, Paul Claudel (Jean-Luc Vincent) in Camille Claudel 1915, the lens of the grotesque, pushing the grandparents in Li'l Quinquin to go beyond what is expected and how "grace is really within the reach of all of us."
Bruno Dumont on Camille Claudel 1915: "I think for me, using the grotesque, it's almost as though it were a lens.
- 5/7/2017
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Fabrice Luchini, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Lauréna Thellier, Juliette Binoche, Raph, Manon Royère as the Van Peteghems in Bruno Dumont's wild Slack Bay (Ma Loute)
"I think each one of us has in us both some Brufort (Thierry Lavieville and Brandon Lavieville) and some Van Peteghem (see photo above)."
Bruno Dumont's latest, the musical Jeannette, L'Enfance De Jeanne d'Arc, will screen at the Cannes Film Festival where his Li'l Quinquin and Slack Bay (Ma Loute) had their world premieres. In our conversation the director/screenwriter discussed the character of the brother, Paul Claudel (Jean-Luc Vincent) in Camille Claudel 1915, the lens of the grotesque, pushing the grandparents in Li'l Quinquin to go beyond what is expected and how "grace is really within the reach of all of us."
Ma Loute (Brandon Lavieville) and Billie (Raph), police inspectors Machin (Didier Després) and Malfoy (Cyril Rigaux)
When tourists start to disappear...
"I think each one of us has in us both some Brufort (Thierry Lavieville and Brandon Lavieville) and some Van Peteghem (see photo above)."
Bruno Dumont's latest, the musical Jeannette, L'Enfance De Jeanne d'Arc, will screen at the Cannes Film Festival where his Li'l Quinquin and Slack Bay (Ma Loute) had their world premieres. In our conversation the director/screenwriter discussed the character of the brother, Paul Claudel (Jean-Luc Vincent) in Camille Claudel 1915, the lens of the grotesque, pushing the grandparents in Li'l Quinquin to go beyond what is expected and how "grace is really within the reach of all of us."
Ma Loute (Brandon Lavieville) and Billie (Raph), police inspectors Machin (Didier Després) and Malfoy (Cyril Rigaux)
When tourists start to disappear...
- 5/7/2017
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Bruno Dumont pushed himself as a filmmaker with his comic detective miniseries P’tit Quinquin (2014), and now he seems to have confirmed this new direction for the cinema with Slack Bay, a pratfall-filled coastal tale of crime and love set in the 1910s. The crime is missing tourists in a poor seaside village on Côte d'Opale; the investigators a blimp-sized local detective and his pint-sized sidekick; and the love is between a local boy and a cross-dressing young beauty of a rich family whose gratuitously Egyptian-style mansion sits sentinel over the titular marshy bay.In this far-flung location the French director ambitiously expands his experiment begun with his first period film, Camille Claudel 1915 (2013), where his preferred cast of non-professional locals—including, in that film, those with mental disabilities—acted alongside mega-star Juliette Binoche. In Slack Bay, Binoche returns as a rich flit and mother of the romantic youth of ambiguous gender,...
- 4/25/2017
- MUBI
The lineup for the 2017 Directors’ Fortnight (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs) at Cannes has been announced:Opening Film: Un beau soleil interieur (Claire Denis)Closing Film:Patti Cake$ (Geremy Jasper)Feature Films A Ciambra (Jonas Carpignano)Alive in France (Abel Ferrara)L'amant d'un jour (Philippe Garrel)Bushwick (Cary Murnion & Jonathan Milott) Cuori Puri (Roberto de Paolis)The Florida Project (Sean Baker)Frost (Sharunas Bartas)I'm Not a Witch (Rungano Nyoni) Jeannette, l'enfance de Jeanne D'Arc (Bruno Dumont)L'intrusa (Leonardo di Constanzo)La Defensa del Dragón (Natalia Santa)Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (Mouly Surya) Mobile Homes (Vladimir de Fontenay)Nothingwood (Sonia Kronlund) Ôtez-moi d'un doute (Carine Tardieu) The Rider (Chloe Zhao)West of the Jordan River (Field Day Revisited) (Amos Gitai)SHORTSÁgua Mole (Laura Goncalves & Alexandra Ramires)La bouche (Camilo Restrepo)Copa-loca (Christos Massalas)Crème de menthe (David Philippe Gagne & Jean-Marc E. Roy)Farpões, Baldios (Marta Matheus)Min Börda (Niki Lindroth von Bahr...
- 4/24/2017
- MUBI
Canal+
Biopics have been a cinema institution since 1900, when French actress Bleuette Bernon starred as Joan of Arc in George Melies’ silent film of the same name, but such a role comes with far more pressure than usual for the starring actor. The portrayal needs to remain true to the character as the audience already knows it, and this requires something that even the most talented of actors can struggle to bring to the screen: authenticity.
The job, then, becomes even more of a challenge when it comes to biopics of figures who are in the acting profession themselves. For an actor to play an actor requires a level of imitation that encompasses the whole of the character’s on-screen and off-screen persona, and this inevitably means being measured up to and compared against the skill and integrity of the very actor being portrayed.
Can anybody really capture the elegance and grace of Audrey Hepburn?...
Biopics have been a cinema institution since 1900, when French actress Bleuette Bernon starred as Joan of Arc in George Melies’ silent film of the same name, but such a role comes with far more pressure than usual for the starring actor. The portrayal needs to remain true to the character as the audience already knows it, and this requires something that even the most talented of actors can struggle to bring to the screen: authenticity.
The job, then, becomes even more of a challenge when it comes to biopics of figures who are in the acting profession themselves. For an actor to play an actor requires a level of imitation that encompasses the whole of the character’s on-screen and off-screen persona, and this inevitably means being measured up to and compared against the skill and integrity of the very actor being portrayed.
Can anybody really capture the elegance and grace of Audrey Hepburn?...
- 1/31/2015
- by Alex Porritt
- Obsessed with Film
This is a reprint of an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education , L’affaire Natan, about a little known story given new life, the Dreyfus affair of French cinema. “Natan", a new documentary from Ireland by the filmmakers David Cairns and Paul Duane, sketches in the full and fascinating picture—enumerating Natan’s achievements, debunking the allegations, and reconstructing a legacy lost to malign neglect. Entitled Nazis, French Port and Film Studies: Bernard Natan’s Strange Saga, by Thomas Doherty, chair of the American-studies program at Brandeis University whose most recent book is Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press, 2013).
Nazis, French Porn, and Film Studies: Bernard Natan's Strange Saga
By Thomas Doherty
Mention Bernard Natan to even the most obsessive connoisseur of French cinema and you’re liable to get a blank stare. If recognized at all, the name might call up a vague association with sleaze and scandal. "Natan", a new documentary from Ireland by the filmmakers David Cairns and Paul Duane, sketches in the full and fascinating picture—enumerating Natan’s achievements, debunking the allegations, and reconstructing a legacy lost to malign neglect.
Natan, né Natan Tannenzapf, was a Romanian Jew who immigrated to Paris in 1905 and went on to become a titan of French film, a man whose brand name, for a time, rivaled that of Gaumont and Pathé, founding fathers of le cinéma français. At once media visionary and rapacious entrepreneur, he burned bright over the City of Lights until an arrest for fraud sent him crashing to earth. Following a sensational trial laced with xenophobia and anti-Semitism, he was sentenced to four years in the Prison de la Santé, in Paris, which is where the Nazis found him. Shipped to Auschwitz, Natan perished in 1943 and promptly vanished—or was he erased?—from historical memory.
Natan seeks to undo the second injustice. At a brisk 66 minutes, it unspools like a much shorter, cinema-centric version of Marcel Ophuls’s epic documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), the searing j’accuse that vaporized the glorious myth of consensual French resistance during the Nazi occupation. Francophilic cinephiles are sometimes afflicted with a similar case of selective amnesia, hailing the subversive frisson of Marcel Carné’sChildren of Paradise (1945) while forgetting the collaborationist filmmakers who adapted to the new regime without missing a beat. A different kind of film noir, Natan unravels the knots in three interlacing threads: the nature of history (whom do we remember and whom do we choose to forget?), the tenacity of French anti-Semitism (where the indigenous variant proves a congenial blend with the imported vintage from Germany), and (here’s where things get strange) the archival shadows of pornography flickering in film studies.
The outlines of Natan’s biography read like a Gallic version of an American rags-to-riches story featuring a colorful hustler who might have fit in well with the moguls who built an empire of their own in Hollywood. A self-made Frenchman, perhaps in nothing so much as his passion for the emerging art of the century, Natan arrived in Paris when the city was still reeling from the actualités of Auguste and Louis Lumière and the prestidigitation of Georges Méliès. Hitting the ground floor running, Natan took any gig available: lab worker and projectionist, tripod carrier and camera-cranker, and, in 1910, an outré credit—probably on a nudie film—that earned him a hefty fine and jail time for trafficking in obscene material. Still, he assimilated with a vengeance, marrying a French Catholic and enlisting in the French army during the Great War. His heroic service at the front was his passport to French citizenship; it also got the prewar bust for obscenity expunged from his record.
Mustered out, Natan assumed a prominent role in rebuilding an industry left prostrate by the Great War and plowed under by Hollywood imports. He acquired exclusive rights to film the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, built high-quality processing plants for developing and duping prints, and moved into the production of top-line features, most notably the patriotic blockbuster The Marvelous Life of Joan of Arc (1929), directed by Marco de Gastyne. Both a detail-oriented manager and a big-picture man, Natan kept a hand in all ends of the business, from the chemicals used in the labs to the interior design of the theaters.
Even before the onset of sound, in 1927, Charles Pathé had lamented that there was no more money to be made from motion pictures. Natan knew better. In 1929 he bought out Pathé—whose "crowing rooster" logo was as much an emblem of ur-Frenchness as the Eiffel Tower—and, under the name Pathé-Natan, set about consolidating his various holdings into a vertically integrated business, a streamlined system of production, distribution, and exhibition, just like the major Hollywood studios. To a remarkable extent, he succeeded—creating big-budget, must-see feature films, building a fleet of ornate theaters, and bringing technical innovations like sound and Technicolor to the French screen. Among the 70 or so feature attractions produced under his shingle are two enduring classics by the director Raymond Bernard: Wooden Crosses (1932), a grim, trench-level slog through the Great War, and Les Misérables (1934), a prestige literary adaptation that, as the documentarians Duane and Cairns cannily note, probably had a personal reverberation for Natan, with its theme of a powerful man haunted by a petty crime from his past.
So far, so business-as-usual, not unlike a TCM documentary on Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer. But then the story detours into a distinctly French quarter. In December 1938, at the height of his power, Natan was hobbled by two indictments, that he was a swindler and a Jew. He could mount a defense against only one. More-scandalous allegations were whispered—actually, in the right-wing press, shouted: that Natan’s long-ago brush with the law was no youthful indiscretion but part of a pattern of perversity. Despite his high profile and respected position, the coverage suggested, the slick foreigner was still peddling pornographic films to an underground market of like-minded lechers. The charges were straight from the playbook of the Nazi propagandists, echoing the double-barreled libels of Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic rag Der Stürmer, where the Jew was depicted as an invasive virus sucking the life out of the body politic while defiling the purity of the native bloodline.
Unfolding from January to June 1939, trumpeted in lurid press headlines, the criminal case against Natan involved cooked books, stock manipulation, and dummy holding companies. In brief, he was accused of robbing his own company blind and cheating the stockholders. He confessed to manipulating funds—but only, he insisted, to keep his company afloat, not to bilk the stockholders. Unmoved, the court sentenced him to four years in prison. In 1940, under the Third Republic and still before the Nazi invasion, the sentence was extended to five years. The next year, a Vichy court deprived him of the French citizenship he had won during the Great War. When the Nazis requested custody of Natan (according to the French Holocaust historian Serge Klarsfeld, Natan was one of only two French Jews targeted by name, the other being Léon Blum, the former prime minister), the Vichy authorities readily complied. As the French film historian Georges Sadoul remarked, Natan’s prison cell served as the "antechamber to the oven of the crematorium."
The obvious French back story to l’affaire Natan is the case of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain whom the French military railroaded into Devil’s Island on a trumped-up charge of treason in 1895. "You might call this the Dreyfus affair of cinema," says the director and actor Frédéric Tachou. But the criminal charges against Natan are a bit harder to disentangle. In 1940, the Hollywood trade paper Variety, which had no dog in the fight, reviewed what it called "the largest scandal ever recorded in the French cinema world" and came down hard on the man in the cross hairs of the French justice system: Natan "built up a monster organization without sound financial foundation and it collapsed of its own dead weight, although it required more than 10 years to bring him to justice."
Nonetheless, a cadre of French film historians has been adamant that Natan was set up; that, despite his confession, he was no less a victim of anti-Semitic hysteria than Dreyfus. André Rossel-Kirschen, Natan’s nephew and the author of Pathé-Natan: the True History, published in France in 2004, attacked the legend of the "swindler Natan" as a smear by greedy business interests seeking to gain control of a company that was not a hollowed-out shell but a solid moneymaker—that, in fact, was always in the black. The French historian Gilles Willems, another diligent researcher in the archives of Pathé, also scorns "the tenacious legend" regarding "the Jewish swindler of Romanian descent, Bernard Natan, who acquired the great Pathé firm the better to pillage it."
For film scholars lacking a Cpa license, the labyrinthine bookkeeping trail is difficult to follow—a confirmation of the cynical Hollywood adage that the most creative people in the motion-picture business work in the studios' accounting departments. In a blog post on the making of the documentary, the filmmaker Cairns offers what seems a measured appraisal: that Natan "did more good than harm" in the annals of French cinema, and that whatever the nature of his financial malfeasance, he "was scapegoated and punished with a grotesque severity."
Ironically, after getting little more than a footnote in most chronicles of the French cinema, Franco or Anglophone, it would be the more scandalous charge that rescued Natan from his cruel fade to black. In 1993, Joseph W. Slade, a professor of media and culture at Ohio University, published an article in the Journal of Film and Video with the come-hither title "Bernard Natan: France’s Legendary Pornographer." The piece was both salacious and, as it turned out, propitious. Slade was a pioneer in what has since morphed into a full-blown subfield of cinema studies—porn studies. Jump-started by the University of California at Berkeley film professor Linda Williams’s Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible,’ published in 1989, and lent momentum by her edited collection, Porn Studies, in 2004, the close textual examination of pornography has turned from what was, not so long ago, an indictable offense into an au courant career path in the academy. Feminist critics especially have cultivated a nonprurient interest in porn, seeing in the raw footage an unfiltered lens into the male—and female—psyche, not to say physique.
Despite smirking from the mainstream press, few media scholars today would argue that a multibillion-dollar industry that has thrived since the dawn of cinema is not worthy of serious scrutiny and archival excavation. That consensus is confirmed by the steady inroads of a series of exceptionally well-attended panels at annual meetings of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and, this spring, the debut of Porn Studies, an academic journal devoted to all things triple-x. If anything, the mainstreaming of porn in media studies has lagged behind its mainstreaming on the motion-picture screen, cable, and the web.
Slade’s article certainly resurrected Natan—not as a forgotten giant of the French film industry, but rather as a priapic smut merchant. Slade charged that even as Natan was consolidating his aboveboard cinematic empire, he "unquestionably turned out some of the most historically significant hard-core footage made during the silent era." More than that, Slade contended that Natan was a featured player in many of the films, exuberantly joining in with the sadomasochism, sodomy, and bestiality. "Natan’s dapper, slightly vulpine figure, capable of stalking or mincing as the role demanded, suited the storylines," he asserted. No prude himself, Slade frankly admired the sheer épater le bourgeois of Natan’s risky moonlighting, pointing out that "as a pornographer," Natan "parodied a bland, reactionary mainstream cinema."
The French, who love a good trans-Atlantic donnybrook over cinema more than a Gitane after dinner, took to the conference-journal-and-cyberspace barricades to defend Natan’s honor. None have been more tenacious than the archivist Brigitte Berg, director of Les Documents Cinématographiques in Paris, who on the website Les indépendants du premier siècle, blasted Slade’s "poor knowledge of both the man Bernard Natan and the French cinema in general" and accused him of "slander," "fantasies," and (the mildest cut) "a rich imagination." (Unfortunately, Berg played no role in Natan, because of creative/scholarly/economic differences with the filmmakers.)
Natan resolves the fracas with a montage worth a thousand monographs: the first extended unreeling of Natan’s alleged on-screen acrobatics. Inarguably, the glimpses of proto-porno from the prewar, silent era possess redeeming archival value, from the posed nudes in nickelodeon-era stag films (pretty much the kind of mild erotica you might see on a visit to the Louvre) to the hard-core coupling, and tripling, of the 1920s and 1930s. The most shocking snippet (I have never seen anything like it and, if I had, I wouldn’t admit it) features a randy swain engaging in sexual congress with a mallard. (The French title—Le Canard—sounds far more genteel than the rhyming imperative that is its English billing.) "The ugliest film I have ever seen in my life," says the archivist Serge Bromberg. "We didn’t want to restore it."
But, of course, the best argument for restoration is that without being able to eyeball the primary source, the canard against Natan would persist. Freeze-framing and telescoping in on close-ups of the actor, the filmmakers compare the visage of the energetic star in the French porn with contemporaneous pictures of Natan, plainly showing that the men are not one and the same. The accusation always sounded unlikely—sort of as if David O. Selznick used his off time during Gone With the Wind (1939) to cavort in blue movies shot in 16mm down in the Valley. On camera, Slade now concedes that there may be reasonable doubt as to the identity of the performer and to Natan’s filmography in pornography. "I do not now believe that Natan performed in the films," he wrote me in an email, "but I do think it is likely that he was involved in their making." Although he finds Natan "somewhat maudlin," he is "delighted that Natan is at last getting the attention he deserves, attention long denied him because of the anti-Semitism that has for so long erased him from French film history."
It is odd, though, that a story that hits so many of the buttons of film scholarship—and that is this juicy—has been for so long so forgotten. "I don’t think he has been airbrushed out" of history, says the writer Bart Bull in Natan. "I think he has been deliberately destroyed." Yet it’s hard to gauge how much of the history in any field just slips down the rabbit hole of memory—like say, the story of the unheralded pioneers of American film, Harry and Roy Aitken, who produced The Birth of a Nation (1915)—and how much results from willful acts of historical erasure. However, one can see why historians of French cinema would rather remember the glory that was the cinéma français than they would the political, cultural, and business sadism, the bigotry and hypocrisy, not to mention the seediness intertwined with the triumphs in the story of Bernard Natan.
Appropriately, the most inspired sequence in Natan is also a work of restoration, though not of a pornographic film, at least not as usually defined. A newsreel clip shows Natan in the dock in 1941, at the trial that stripped him of his citizenship, a sequence that Ophuls also unspooled inThe Sorrow and the Pity. "This is not a comedy," sputters Natan, trying to hide from the cameras. "This is a tragedy." Produced by none other than Pathé Cinema, by then a tool of the Nazi occupation, the newsreel dubs in a panicky high-pitched voice for Natan, to make the outcast Jew sound like a squealing rat. Duane and Cairns correct the distortion, rewinding the clip with Natan’s real voice on the soundtrack. "You can hear his real voice in another clip used in the film where he’s telling architects what he wants in his cinemas," Duane told me in an email. "We pitch-shifted the sped-up voice in the trial newsreel until it was closer to the way he really sounded."
The gesture neatly demonstrates that if film can distort and delete history, it can also restore and repair it. "The man is dead," says the narrator at the beginning of Natan. "Even his memory has been destroyed."
No more.
Nazis, French Porn, and Film Studies: Bernard Natan's Strange Saga
By Thomas Doherty
Mention Bernard Natan to even the most obsessive connoisseur of French cinema and you’re liable to get a blank stare. If recognized at all, the name might call up a vague association with sleaze and scandal. "Natan", a new documentary from Ireland by the filmmakers David Cairns and Paul Duane, sketches in the full and fascinating picture—enumerating Natan’s achievements, debunking the allegations, and reconstructing a legacy lost to malign neglect.
Natan, né Natan Tannenzapf, was a Romanian Jew who immigrated to Paris in 1905 and went on to become a titan of French film, a man whose brand name, for a time, rivaled that of Gaumont and Pathé, founding fathers of le cinéma français. At once media visionary and rapacious entrepreneur, he burned bright over the City of Lights until an arrest for fraud sent him crashing to earth. Following a sensational trial laced with xenophobia and anti-Semitism, he was sentenced to four years in the Prison de la Santé, in Paris, which is where the Nazis found him. Shipped to Auschwitz, Natan perished in 1943 and promptly vanished—or was he erased?—from historical memory.
Natan seeks to undo the second injustice. At a brisk 66 minutes, it unspools like a much shorter, cinema-centric version of Marcel Ophuls’s epic documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), the searing j’accuse that vaporized the glorious myth of consensual French resistance during the Nazi occupation. Francophilic cinephiles are sometimes afflicted with a similar case of selective amnesia, hailing the subversive frisson of Marcel Carné’sChildren of Paradise (1945) while forgetting the collaborationist filmmakers who adapted to the new regime without missing a beat. A different kind of film noir, Natan unravels the knots in three interlacing threads: the nature of history (whom do we remember and whom do we choose to forget?), the tenacity of French anti-Semitism (where the indigenous variant proves a congenial blend with the imported vintage from Germany), and (here’s where things get strange) the archival shadows of pornography flickering in film studies.
The outlines of Natan’s biography read like a Gallic version of an American rags-to-riches story featuring a colorful hustler who might have fit in well with the moguls who built an empire of their own in Hollywood. A self-made Frenchman, perhaps in nothing so much as his passion for the emerging art of the century, Natan arrived in Paris when the city was still reeling from the actualités of Auguste and Louis Lumière and the prestidigitation of Georges Méliès. Hitting the ground floor running, Natan took any gig available: lab worker and projectionist, tripod carrier and camera-cranker, and, in 1910, an outré credit—probably on a nudie film—that earned him a hefty fine and jail time for trafficking in obscene material. Still, he assimilated with a vengeance, marrying a French Catholic and enlisting in the French army during the Great War. His heroic service at the front was his passport to French citizenship; it also got the prewar bust for obscenity expunged from his record.
Mustered out, Natan assumed a prominent role in rebuilding an industry left prostrate by the Great War and plowed under by Hollywood imports. He acquired exclusive rights to film the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, built high-quality processing plants for developing and duping prints, and moved into the production of top-line features, most notably the patriotic blockbuster The Marvelous Life of Joan of Arc (1929), directed by Marco de Gastyne. Both a detail-oriented manager and a big-picture man, Natan kept a hand in all ends of the business, from the chemicals used in the labs to the interior design of the theaters.
Even before the onset of sound, in 1927, Charles Pathé had lamented that there was no more money to be made from motion pictures. Natan knew better. In 1929 he bought out Pathé—whose "crowing rooster" logo was as much an emblem of ur-Frenchness as the Eiffel Tower—and, under the name Pathé-Natan, set about consolidating his various holdings into a vertically integrated business, a streamlined system of production, distribution, and exhibition, just like the major Hollywood studios. To a remarkable extent, he succeeded—creating big-budget, must-see feature films, building a fleet of ornate theaters, and bringing technical innovations like sound and Technicolor to the French screen. Among the 70 or so feature attractions produced under his shingle are two enduring classics by the director Raymond Bernard: Wooden Crosses (1932), a grim, trench-level slog through the Great War, and Les Misérables (1934), a prestige literary adaptation that, as the documentarians Duane and Cairns cannily note, probably had a personal reverberation for Natan, with its theme of a powerful man haunted by a petty crime from his past.
So far, so business-as-usual, not unlike a TCM documentary on Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer. But then the story detours into a distinctly French quarter. In December 1938, at the height of his power, Natan was hobbled by two indictments, that he was a swindler and a Jew. He could mount a defense against only one. More-scandalous allegations were whispered—actually, in the right-wing press, shouted: that Natan’s long-ago brush with the law was no youthful indiscretion but part of a pattern of perversity. Despite his high profile and respected position, the coverage suggested, the slick foreigner was still peddling pornographic films to an underground market of like-minded lechers. The charges were straight from the playbook of the Nazi propagandists, echoing the double-barreled libels of Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic rag Der Stürmer, where the Jew was depicted as an invasive virus sucking the life out of the body politic while defiling the purity of the native bloodline.
Unfolding from January to June 1939, trumpeted in lurid press headlines, the criminal case against Natan involved cooked books, stock manipulation, and dummy holding companies. In brief, he was accused of robbing his own company blind and cheating the stockholders. He confessed to manipulating funds—but only, he insisted, to keep his company afloat, not to bilk the stockholders. Unmoved, the court sentenced him to four years in prison. In 1940, under the Third Republic and still before the Nazi invasion, the sentence was extended to five years. The next year, a Vichy court deprived him of the French citizenship he had won during the Great War. When the Nazis requested custody of Natan (according to the French Holocaust historian Serge Klarsfeld, Natan was one of only two French Jews targeted by name, the other being Léon Blum, the former prime minister), the Vichy authorities readily complied. As the French film historian Georges Sadoul remarked, Natan’s prison cell served as the "antechamber to the oven of the crematorium."
The obvious French back story to l’affaire Natan is the case of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain whom the French military railroaded into Devil’s Island on a trumped-up charge of treason in 1895. "You might call this the Dreyfus affair of cinema," says the director and actor Frédéric Tachou. But the criminal charges against Natan are a bit harder to disentangle. In 1940, the Hollywood trade paper Variety, which had no dog in the fight, reviewed what it called "the largest scandal ever recorded in the French cinema world" and came down hard on the man in the cross hairs of the French justice system: Natan "built up a monster organization without sound financial foundation and it collapsed of its own dead weight, although it required more than 10 years to bring him to justice."
Nonetheless, a cadre of French film historians has been adamant that Natan was set up; that, despite his confession, he was no less a victim of anti-Semitic hysteria than Dreyfus. André Rossel-Kirschen, Natan’s nephew and the author of Pathé-Natan: the True History, published in France in 2004, attacked the legend of the "swindler Natan" as a smear by greedy business interests seeking to gain control of a company that was not a hollowed-out shell but a solid moneymaker—that, in fact, was always in the black. The French historian Gilles Willems, another diligent researcher in the archives of Pathé, also scorns "the tenacious legend" regarding "the Jewish swindler of Romanian descent, Bernard Natan, who acquired the great Pathé firm the better to pillage it."
For film scholars lacking a Cpa license, the labyrinthine bookkeeping trail is difficult to follow—a confirmation of the cynical Hollywood adage that the most creative people in the motion-picture business work in the studios' accounting departments. In a blog post on the making of the documentary, the filmmaker Cairns offers what seems a measured appraisal: that Natan "did more good than harm" in the annals of French cinema, and that whatever the nature of his financial malfeasance, he "was scapegoated and punished with a grotesque severity."
Ironically, after getting little more than a footnote in most chronicles of the French cinema, Franco or Anglophone, it would be the more scandalous charge that rescued Natan from his cruel fade to black. In 1993, Joseph W. Slade, a professor of media and culture at Ohio University, published an article in the Journal of Film and Video with the come-hither title "Bernard Natan: France’s Legendary Pornographer." The piece was both salacious and, as it turned out, propitious. Slade was a pioneer in what has since morphed into a full-blown subfield of cinema studies—porn studies. Jump-started by the University of California at Berkeley film professor Linda Williams’s Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible,’ published in 1989, and lent momentum by her edited collection, Porn Studies, in 2004, the close textual examination of pornography has turned from what was, not so long ago, an indictable offense into an au courant career path in the academy. Feminist critics especially have cultivated a nonprurient interest in porn, seeing in the raw footage an unfiltered lens into the male—and female—psyche, not to say physique.
Despite smirking from the mainstream press, few media scholars today would argue that a multibillion-dollar industry that has thrived since the dawn of cinema is not worthy of serious scrutiny and archival excavation. That consensus is confirmed by the steady inroads of a series of exceptionally well-attended panels at annual meetings of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and, this spring, the debut of Porn Studies, an academic journal devoted to all things triple-x. If anything, the mainstreaming of porn in media studies has lagged behind its mainstreaming on the motion-picture screen, cable, and the web.
Slade’s article certainly resurrected Natan—not as a forgotten giant of the French film industry, but rather as a priapic smut merchant. Slade charged that even as Natan was consolidating his aboveboard cinematic empire, he "unquestionably turned out some of the most historically significant hard-core footage made during the silent era." More than that, Slade contended that Natan was a featured player in many of the films, exuberantly joining in with the sadomasochism, sodomy, and bestiality. "Natan’s dapper, slightly vulpine figure, capable of stalking or mincing as the role demanded, suited the storylines," he asserted. No prude himself, Slade frankly admired the sheer épater le bourgeois of Natan’s risky moonlighting, pointing out that "as a pornographer," Natan "parodied a bland, reactionary mainstream cinema."
The French, who love a good trans-Atlantic donnybrook over cinema more than a Gitane after dinner, took to the conference-journal-and-cyberspace barricades to defend Natan’s honor. None have been more tenacious than the archivist Brigitte Berg, director of Les Documents Cinématographiques in Paris, who on the website Les indépendants du premier siècle, blasted Slade’s "poor knowledge of both the man Bernard Natan and the French cinema in general" and accused him of "slander," "fantasies," and (the mildest cut) "a rich imagination." (Unfortunately, Berg played no role in Natan, because of creative/scholarly/economic differences with the filmmakers.)
Natan resolves the fracas with a montage worth a thousand monographs: the first extended unreeling of Natan’s alleged on-screen acrobatics. Inarguably, the glimpses of proto-porno from the prewar, silent era possess redeeming archival value, from the posed nudes in nickelodeon-era stag films (pretty much the kind of mild erotica you might see on a visit to the Louvre) to the hard-core coupling, and tripling, of the 1920s and 1930s. The most shocking snippet (I have never seen anything like it and, if I had, I wouldn’t admit it) features a randy swain engaging in sexual congress with a mallard. (The French title—Le Canard—sounds far more genteel than the rhyming imperative that is its English billing.) "The ugliest film I have ever seen in my life," says the archivist Serge Bromberg. "We didn’t want to restore it."
But, of course, the best argument for restoration is that without being able to eyeball the primary source, the canard against Natan would persist. Freeze-framing and telescoping in on close-ups of the actor, the filmmakers compare the visage of the energetic star in the French porn with contemporaneous pictures of Natan, plainly showing that the men are not one and the same. The accusation always sounded unlikely—sort of as if David O. Selznick used his off time during Gone With the Wind (1939) to cavort in blue movies shot in 16mm down in the Valley. On camera, Slade now concedes that there may be reasonable doubt as to the identity of the performer and to Natan’s filmography in pornography. "I do not now believe that Natan performed in the films," he wrote me in an email, "but I do think it is likely that he was involved in their making." Although he finds Natan "somewhat maudlin," he is "delighted that Natan is at last getting the attention he deserves, attention long denied him because of the anti-Semitism that has for so long erased him from French film history."
It is odd, though, that a story that hits so many of the buttons of film scholarship—and that is this juicy—has been for so long so forgotten. "I don’t think he has been airbrushed out" of history, says the writer Bart Bull in Natan. "I think he has been deliberately destroyed." Yet it’s hard to gauge how much of the history in any field just slips down the rabbit hole of memory—like say, the story of the unheralded pioneers of American film, Harry and Roy Aitken, who produced The Birth of a Nation (1915)—and how much results from willful acts of historical erasure. However, one can see why historians of French cinema would rather remember the glory that was the cinéma français than they would the political, cultural, and business sadism, the bigotry and hypocrisy, not to mention the seediness intertwined with the triumphs in the story of Bernard Natan.
Appropriately, the most inspired sequence in Natan is also a work of restoration, though not of a pornographic film, at least not as usually defined. A newsreel clip shows Natan in the dock in 1941, at the trial that stripped him of his citizenship, a sequence that Ophuls also unspooled inThe Sorrow and the Pity. "This is not a comedy," sputters Natan, trying to hide from the cameras. "This is a tragedy." Produced by none other than Pathé Cinema, by then a tool of the Nazi occupation, the newsreel dubs in a panicky high-pitched voice for Natan, to make the outcast Jew sound like a squealing rat. Duane and Cairns correct the distortion, rewinding the clip with Natan’s real voice on the soundtrack. "You can hear his real voice in another clip used in the film where he’s telling architects what he wants in his cinemas," Duane told me in an email. "We pitch-shifted the sped-up voice in the trial newsreel until it was closer to the way he really sounded."
The gesture neatly demonstrates that if film can distort and delete history, it can also restore and repair it. "The man is dead," says the narrator at the beginning of Natan. "Even his memory has been destroyed."
No more.
- 6/12/2014
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
With Arcade Fire launching the live stream for their new album Reflektor against clips from Marcel Camus' "Black Orpheus," it was only a matter of time before someone else decided to match up the Montreal band's music with more classic films. And Craig J. Clark has done just that. This unofficial video for the band's "Joan Of Arc" cuts it against scenes from a trio of movies: "The Passion of Joan of Arc" directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer; "Jeanne d'Arc," directed by Georges Méliès; and "Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages," directed by Benjamin Christensen. The result? Well, you'll just have to watch it down below and be sure to let us know what you think in the comments section. As for the band, they'll be hitting an arena near you in 2014.
- 11/15/2013
- by Kevin Jagernauth
- The Playlist
Miley Cyrus now claims she is "one of the biggest feminists in the world" because she believes women should be unafraid to go nude, twerk in public or smoke pot on camera. Really.
"There's absolutely no contradiction at all between being a feminist and taking your clothes off, and being comfortable about displaying your sexuality," the "Wrecking Ball" singer tells BBC Radio1's "Newsbeat." Because, after all, men can go sans shirts in public, "So why can't we?" Wow, talk about a fighter for equality.
Miley was recently called out on the carpet by one of her pop music predecessors Sinead O'Connor, who wrote in an open letter to Cyrus, "Real empowerment of yourself as a woman would be to refuse to exploit your body or your sexuality in order for men to make money from you." Still, the pop star readily concedes her antics on the 2013 MTV VMAs and...
"There's absolutely no contradiction at all between being a feminist and taking your clothes off, and being comfortable about displaying your sexuality," the "Wrecking Ball" singer tells BBC Radio1's "Newsbeat." Because, after all, men can go sans shirts in public, "So why can't we?" Wow, talk about a fighter for equality.
Miley was recently called out on the carpet by one of her pop music predecessors Sinead O'Connor, who wrote in an open letter to Cyrus, "Real empowerment of yourself as a woman would be to refuse to exploit your body or your sexuality in order for men to make money from you." Still, the pop star readily concedes her antics on the 2013 MTV VMAs and...
- 11/15/2013
- by editorial@zap2it.com
- Pop2it
Director Arnaud Desplechin sends Mathieu Amalric packing. Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Joaquin Phoenix and Marion Cotillard give us characters who decide on survival in James Gray's The Immigrant. Mathieu Amalric as a therapist of veiled past confronts the title's Native American war veteran played by Benicio Del Toro in Arnaud Desplechin's resonant Jimmy P: Psychotherapy Of A Plains Indian, and Gloria (Paulina García) in Sebastián Lelio's film knows that you don't need to be in a costume drama to dress up. Free association may lead from a skateboard ride in (Gloria producer) Pablo Larraín's No to dancing skeletons, Arthur Ripley's gripping The Chase to John Huston's Let There Be Light, and Maria Falconetti's performance in Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc to rickets.
Who are you? How does reinvention work? Do we have to change country, nationality, language, or profession to become ourselves?
The Immigrant
Joaquin Phoenix...
Joaquin Phoenix and Marion Cotillard give us characters who decide on survival in James Gray's The Immigrant. Mathieu Amalric as a therapist of veiled past confronts the title's Native American war veteran played by Benicio Del Toro in Arnaud Desplechin's resonant Jimmy P: Psychotherapy Of A Plains Indian, and Gloria (Paulina García) in Sebastián Lelio's film knows that you don't need to be in a costume drama to dress up. Free association may lead from a skateboard ride in (Gloria producer) Pablo Larraín's No to dancing skeletons, Arthur Ripley's gripping The Chase to John Huston's Let There Be Light, and Maria Falconetti's performance in Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc to rickets.
Who are you? How does reinvention work? Do we have to change country, nationality, language, or profession to become ourselves?
The Immigrant
Joaquin Phoenix...
- 10/13/2013
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Anne-Katrin Titze goes on safari in New York City with Soldate Jeannette director Daniel Hoesl.
Meeting up with Daniel Hoesl in a Manhattan café before he jets off to the Sundance Film Festival where his Soldate Jeannette is showing in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition category, we discuss working with director Ulrich Seidl, wildlife, the cost of eggs, and how Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre Sa Vie watching Carl Theodor Dreyer's Passion Of Jeanne D'Arc, becomes one with Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles to enter a new chapter in cinema history.
Anne-Katrin Titze: Let's start with the beginning. You start your film with crocodiles and leopards and end in a farm.
Daniel Hoesl on safari in New York, by Anne-Katrin Titze Daniel Hoesl: That's a long bridge. It brings us back to a safari which I took last spring. I was working with Ulrich Seidl.
Meeting up with Daniel Hoesl in a Manhattan café before he jets off to the Sundance Film Festival where his Soldate Jeannette is showing in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition category, we discuss working with director Ulrich Seidl, wildlife, the cost of eggs, and how Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre Sa Vie watching Carl Theodor Dreyer's Passion Of Jeanne D'Arc, becomes one with Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles to enter a new chapter in cinema history.
Anne-Katrin Titze: Let's start with the beginning. You start your film with crocodiles and leopards and end in a farm.
Daniel Hoesl on safari in New York, by Anne-Katrin Titze Daniel Hoesl: That's a long bridge. It brings us back to a safari which I took last spring. I was working with Ulrich Seidl.
- 1/20/2013
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Long-suffering readers will have read many times about my dislike of lists, especially lists of the best or worst movies in this or that category. For years they had value only in the minds of feature editors fretting that their movie critics had too much free time. ("For Thursday's food section, can you list the 10 funniest movies about pumpkin pie?") Now their value has shot way up with the use of slide shows, a diabolical time-waster designed to boost a web site's page visits.
In a field with much competition, Number One on my list of Most Shameless Lists has got to be Time mag's recent list of the "Best 140 Tweeters." How did the magazine present this? That's right, on 140 pages of a slideshow. Considering that the list had no meaning at all except as some hapless intern's grindwork, I'd say that was a bold masterstroke. I say so even though I was on it.
In a field with much competition, Number One on my list of Most Shameless Lists has got to be Time mag's recent list of the "Best 140 Tweeters." How did the magazine present this? That's right, on 140 pages of a slideshow. Considering that the list had no meaning at all except as some hapless intern's grindwork, I'd say that was a bold masterstroke. I say so even though I was on it.
- 4/6/2012
- by Roger Ebert
- blogs.suntimes.com/ebert
With The Artist (2012) having completed its triumphant awards season run, culminating in its five Oscars at this year’s Academy Awards, now seems the ideal time to take a look back at the silent era. Although to many it may seem outdated and redundant today, silent cinema can still offer a unique form of entertainment and spectacle. Additionally, its influence on the world of contemporary cinema goes beyond The Artist to encompass a number of iconic films. However, if you enjoyed Michael Hazanavicius’ ode to silent film then you will surely find plenty here to cherish.
10. Wings (1927)
The only other silent film to have won a Best Picture Oscar, William A. Wellman’s Wings is a melodrama of epic proportions. The story concerns a love triangle between two World War One fighter pilots and a female ambulance driver. Although at times the pace of the film seems long-winded, it is...
10. Wings (1927)
The only other silent film to have won a Best Picture Oscar, William A. Wellman’s Wings is a melodrama of epic proportions. The story concerns a love triangle between two World War One fighter pilots and a female ambulance driver. Although at times the pace of the film seems long-winded, it is...
- 3/1/2012
- Shadowlocked
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