A central figure in French cinema, Bertrand Tavernier has an encyclopedic knowledge of the craft of filmmaking akin to the likes of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. The sense of history he possesses is seen in both his narrative and documentary, the latter of which is perhaps best exemplified in his recent film My Journey Through French Cinema. Clocking in at 3.5 hours, that 2016 documentary has now received a follow-up expansion with an eight-part series and we’re pleased to debut the U.S. trailer.
Titled Journeys Through French Cinema, the director-writer-actor-producer explores the filmmakers that most influenced him, how the cinema of France changed when the country was German occupation, the unknown films and filmmakers he admires (with a focus on female directors), and much more. From better-known filmmakers such as Jacques Tati, Robert Bresson, and Jacques Demy to ones in need of (re)discovery such as Raymond Bernard, Maurice Turner,...
Titled Journeys Through French Cinema, the director-writer-actor-producer explores the filmmakers that most influenced him, how the cinema of France changed when the country was German occupation, the unknown films and filmmakers he admires (with a focus on female directors), and much more. From better-known filmmakers such as Jacques Tati, Robert Bresson, and Jacques Demy to ones in need of (re)discovery such as Raymond Bernard, Maurice Turner,...
- 12/27/2019
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Flanked by UniFrance president Serge Toubiana and the National Orchestra of France, filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier stood before a rapt crowd at Paris’ Maison de la Radio this past Saturday to introduce an evening dedicated to French film scores called “May the Music Begin!”
That moniker – a reference to the original French title of his 1975 César winner “Let The Joy Reign Supreme” – highlighted Tavernier’s personal connection to this project.
“There are many unsung heroes of French cinema,” he explained, “but none more so than our composers.”
Working on a film and subsequent eight-part series, both titled “My Journey Through French Cinema,” the filmmaker became struck by the degree to which French composers had been overlooked in the official accounts of French film history – and spent many lonely years trying to rectify that.
“For five years I felt like I was wandering in the desert,” he reflected, “and then in one...
That moniker – a reference to the original French title of his 1975 César winner “Let The Joy Reign Supreme” – highlighted Tavernier’s personal connection to this project.
“There are many unsung heroes of French cinema,” he explained, “but none more so than our composers.”
Working on a film and subsequent eight-part series, both titled “My Journey Through French Cinema,” the filmmaker became struck by the degree to which French composers had been overlooked in the official accounts of French film history – and spent many lonely years trying to rectify that.
“For five years I felt like I was wandering in the desert,” he reflected, “and then in one...
- 1/21/2019
- by Ben Croll
- Variety Film + TV
http://criterioncast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/60-Late-Ozu-Part-3.mp3
This podcast focuses on Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs. Hosts David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett give an overview of each box and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this final episode of a three-part series (and perhaps the podcast itself), David and Trevor are joined by Matt Gasteier to discuss two films (Late Autumn and The End of Summer) from Eclipse Series 3: Late Ozu.
About the films:
Master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu directed fifty-three feature films over the course of his long career. Yet it was in the final decade of his life, his “old master” phase, that he entered his artistic prime. Centered more than ever on the modern sensibilities of the younger generation, these delicate family dramas are marked by an exquisite formal elegance and emotional sensitivity about birth and death, love and marriage, and...
This podcast focuses on Criterion’s Eclipse Series of DVDs. Hosts David Blakeslee and Trevor Berrett give an overview of each box and offer their perspectives on the unique treasures they find inside. In this final episode of a three-part series (and perhaps the podcast itself), David and Trevor are joined by Matt Gasteier to discuss two films (Late Autumn and The End of Summer) from Eclipse Series 3: Late Ozu.
About the films:
Master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu directed fifty-three feature films over the course of his long career. Yet it was in the final decade of his life, his “old master” phase, that he entered his artistic prime. Centered more than ever on the modern sensibilities of the younger generation, these delicate family dramas are marked by an exquisite formal elegance and emotional sensitivity about birth and death, love and marriage, and...
- 7/30/2017
- by David Blakeslee
- CriterionCast
(Raymond Bernard, 1932; Eureka!, PG)
It took film-makers years to bring the Vietnam war into focus and produce movies like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now. Similarly, half a century earlier, nearly a decade elapsed after the first world war before Us and European directors felt capable of tackling the subject. The cycle began with a great film of the silent era, King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925), and continued into the sound era with Lewis Milestone’s celebrated anti-war All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).
Less sentimental than All Quiet, and surprisingly little known outside France, Les Croix de bois (Wooden Crosses), now revived in a restored centennial version, is one of the most important war movies. Made in 1932 by Raymond Bernard between his two most famous pictures (the silent costume drama The Chess Player and his classic five-hour version of Les Misérables), Wooden Crosses was based on an autobiographical...
It took film-makers years to bring the Vietnam war into focus and produce movies like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now. Similarly, half a century earlier, nearly a decade elapsed after the first world war before Us and European directors felt capable of tackling the subject. The cycle began with a great film of the silent era, King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925), and continued into the sound era with Lewis Milestone’s celebrated anti-war All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).
Less sentimental than All Quiet, and surprisingly little known outside France, Les Croix de bois (Wooden Crosses), now revived in a restored centennial version, is one of the most important war movies. Made in 1932 by Raymond Bernard between his two most famous pictures (the silent costume drama The Chess Player and his classic five-hour version of Les Misérables), Wooden Crosses was based on an autobiographical...
- 5/7/2015
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
(Raymond Bernard, 1932; Eureka!, PG)
It took film-makers years to bring the Vietnam war into focus and produce movies like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now. Similarly, half a century earlier, nearly a decade elapsed after the first world war before Us and European directors felt capable of tackling the subject. The cycle began with a great film of the silent era, King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925), and continued into the sound era with Lewis Milestone’s celebrated anti-war All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).
Less sentimental than All Quiet, and surprisingly little known outside France, Les Croix de bois (Wooden Crosses), now revived in a restored centennial version, is one of the most important war movies. Made in 1932 by Raymond Bernard between his two most famous pictures (the silent costume drama The Chess Player and his classic five-hour version of Les Misérables), Wooden Crosses was based on an autobiographical...
It took film-makers years to bring the Vietnam war into focus and produce movies like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now. Similarly, half a century earlier, nearly a decade elapsed after the first world war before Us and European directors felt capable of tackling the subject. The cycle began with a great film of the silent era, King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925), and continued into the sound era with Lewis Milestone’s celebrated anti-war All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).
Less sentimental than All Quiet, and surprisingly little known outside France, Les Croix de bois (Wooden Crosses), now revived in a restored centennial version, is one of the most important war movies. Made in 1932 by Raymond Bernard between his two most famous pictures (the silent costume drama The Chess Player and his classic five-hour version of Les Misérables), Wooden Crosses was based on an autobiographical...
- 4/26/2015
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
★★★★☆ Upon its initial release in 1932, Raymond Bernard's early-sound war film, Wooden Crosses was hailed as one of the masterpieces of cinema. Since then, it has largely been overlooked in wider discussion of the genre which is a shame, and hopefully something that a new blu-ray release as part of Eureka's continually interesting Masters of Cinema Collection can help to rectify. Often overshadowed by All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) it is a film equally committed to channelling the horror of the trenches during the First World War making use of a variety of visual techniques to imbue its humane but simple narrative with deeper poetry.
- 3/31/2015
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine' 1938: Jean Renoir's film noir (photo: Jean Gabin and Simone Simon in 'La Bête Humaine') (See previous post: "'Cat People' 1942 Actress Simone Simon Remembered.") In the late 1930s, with her Hollywood career stalled while facing competition at 20th Century-Fox from another French import, Annabella (later Tyrone Power's wife), Simone Simon returned to France. Once there, she reestablished herself as an actress to be reckoned with in Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine. An updated version of Émile Zola's 1890 novel, La Bête Humaine is enveloped in a dark, brooding atmosphere not uncommon in pre-World War II French films. Known for their "poetic realism," examples from that era include Renoir's own The Lower Depths (1936), Julien Duvivier's La Belle Équipe (1936) and Pépé le Moko (1937), and particularly Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) and Daybreak (1939).[11] This thematic and...
- 2/6/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
★★★★☆It's extremely fitting that after Tom Hooper's star-studded version of Les Misérables (2012) has exited stage-left that Raymond Bernard original 1934 adaptation of Victor Hugo’s timeless novel should re-appear fully restored. The film was released as three separate features in 1934 but the Pathe-restored Masters of Cinema Blu-ray enables audiences to watch all 300 minutes of the film's torturous struggle in one go. The narrative of this French classic unfolds in an effortless manner moving from Jean Valjean’s (Harry Baur) release from prison and the orphan Fantine’s (Florelle) carefree days, to Valjean’s eventual adoption of Fantine’s orphaned daughter Cosette (Josseline Gaël).
- 12/10/2014
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
Eureka! Entertainment let fly with a volley of announcements earlier today, unveiling their slate for the first quarter of 2015 on both their Masters of Cinema and Eureka! Classics labels.New to Masters of Cinema will be Stanley Donen's Two For The Road, starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney; Fritz Lang's Metropolis gets a 2-disc steelbook re-release that also includes the kitsch classic Giorgio Moroder presents: Metropolis; Claude Lanzmann's epic documentary Shoah arrives alongside 4 Films After Shoah, including Last Of The Unjust; Elia Kazan's Wild River, Sidney Lumet's little-seen cop drama The Offence starring Sean Connery; Raymond Bernard's deeply moving Wwi drama Wooden Crosses; Anthony Mann's Man Of The West with Gary Cooper; and Federico Fellini's Satyricon. On the Eureka! Classics label, Bill Gunn's Ganja And...
[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...
[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...
- 11/27/2014
- Screen Anarchy
Touring festival to show Cannes titles and spotlight Resnais, Truffaut and Tati.
The touring French Film Festival UK (Nov 5 – Dec 4) will host Cannes titles including Mathieu Amalric’s The Blue Room (La Chambre Bleue), Jean-Luc Godard’s 3D trip Goodbye to Language (Adieu Au Langage), and Camera d’Or winner Party Girl, directed by Marie Amachoukeli.
The festival, which travels to cities between Inverness and London, will open with Belgian director Lucas Belvaux’s Not My Type (Pas mon genre), the cultural and social divide romantic comedy with Emilie Dequenne and Loïc Corbery.
There will be tributes to the late Alain Resnais, with screenings of a restored copy of his first feature Hiroshima Mon Amour and the director’s last film Life of Riley, as well as films from François Truffaut and Jacques Tati.
The festival’s First World War focus revolves around a screening of the 1931 classic Wooden Crosses (Les Croix de Bois) by Raymond Bernard.
Cannes...
The touring French Film Festival UK (Nov 5 – Dec 4) will host Cannes titles including Mathieu Amalric’s The Blue Room (La Chambre Bleue), Jean-Luc Godard’s 3D trip Goodbye to Language (Adieu Au Langage), and Camera d’Or winner Party Girl, directed by Marie Amachoukeli.
The festival, which travels to cities between Inverness and London, will open with Belgian director Lucas Belvaux’s Not My Type (Pas mon genre), the cultural and social divide romantic comedy with Emilie Dequenne and Loïc Corbery.
There will be tributes to the late Alain Resnais, with screenings of a restored copy of his first feature Hiroshima Mon Amour and the director’s last film Life of Riley, as well as films from François Truffaut and Jacques Tati.
The festival’s First World War focus revolves around a screening of the 1931 classic Wooden Crosses (Les Croix de Bois) by Raymond Bernard.
Cannes...
- 8/15/2014
- by andreas.wiseman@screendaily.com (Andreas Wiseman)
- ScreenDaily
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
On the occasion of its 700th issue, legendary French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma has partnered with the French Institute Alliance Française (Fiaf), New York's premiere French cultural center, to present a special two-part CinéSalon film series. The series features a selection of rarely shown treasures from French film history and continues in June with a showcase of top picks that have been championed in the pages of the magazine. Indiewire pleased to be partnering with Fiaf and Cahiers du Cinéma to present reviews of films in the series originally published in the magazine and available here in English for the first time with translations by Nicholas Elliott, the magazine's New York correspondent. On Tuesday, May 13, Fiaf screens Raymond Bernard's "Les misérables" (part 1) (4 Pm) and Agnès Varda's "Le bonheur" (7:30 Pm), the latter with an introduction by sex therapist Esther Perel. Legendary French director Paul Vecchiali ("Femmes femmes") wrote the following essay,...
- 5/12/2014
- by Nicholas Elliott
- Indiewire
Above: Sophia Loren, this year's Guest of Honor, in Vittorio De Sica's Marriage Italian Style
The following films comprise this year's slate of Cannes Classics:
Marriage Italian Style (Vittorio De Sica)
A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone)
Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders)
Regards sur une revolution: Comment Yukong déplaça les montagnes (Marceline Loridan & Joris Ivens)
Cruel Story of Youth (Nagisa Oshima)
Wooden Crosses (Raymond Bernard)
Overlord (Stuart Cooper)
Fear (Roberto Rossellini)
Blind Chance (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
The Last Metro (François Truffaut)
Dragon Inn (King Hu)
Daybreak (Marcel Carné)
The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov)
Gracious Living (Jean-Paul Rappeneau)
Jamaica Inn (Alfred Hitchcock)
Les violons du bal (Michel Drach)
Blue Mountains (Eldar Shengelaia)
Lost Horizon (Frank Capra)
La chienne (Jean Renoir)
Tokyo Olympiad (Kon Ichikawa)
8½ (Federico Fellini)
Two Documentaries about Cinema:
Life Itself (Steve James)
The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films (Hilla Medalia)
None of these films will be presented on film.
The following films comprise this year's slate of Cannes Classics:
Marriage Italian Style (Vittorio De Sica)
A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone)
Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders)
Regards sur une revolution: Comment Yukong déplaça les montagnes (Marceline Loridan & Joris Ivens)
Cruel Story of Youth (Nagisa Oshima)
Wooden Crosses (Raymond Bernard)
Overlord (Stuart Cooper)
Fear (Roberto Rossellini)
Blind Chance (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
The Last Metro (François Truffaut)
Dragon Inn (King Hu)
Daybreak (Marcel Carné)
The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov)
Gracious Living (Jean-Paul Rappeneau)
Jamaica Inn (Alfred Hitchcock)
Les violons du bal (Michel Drach)
Blue Mountains (Eldar Shengelaia)
Lost Horizon (Frank Capra)
La chienne (Jean Renoir)
Tokyo Olympiad (Kon Ichikawa)
8½ (Federico Fellini)
Two Documentaries about Cinema:
Life Itself (Steve James)
The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films (Hilla Medalia)
None of these films will be presented on film.
- 5/1/2014
- by Notebook
- MUBI
The Cannes Film Festival isn't just about uncovering the brightest new talents, and freshest expressions of the cinematic art (but yes, it's a huge part of it). Each year, organizers curate a great selection of classic films, and this year is no different. Films by Alfred Hitchcock, Sergio Leone, Frank Capra, Jean Renoir, Wim Wenders, Francois Truffaut, Krzysztof Kieślowski and more will be unveiled, many newly restored, giving the current generation of moviegoers a chance to look back at the movies that likely inspired many Cannes filmmakers. Cannes will also be bestowing Sophia Loren with Guest Of Honor status, with the actress giving a masterclass to attendees. Cannes runs from May 14th to 25th. Press release below. ---------- Sophia Loren as a guest of honor, the birth of the Italian western, 30 years old for Paris, Texas, a homage to Henri Langlois, Kieslowski back at Cannes, a masterpiece of Georgian cinema,...
- 4/30/2014
- by Kevin Jagernauth
- The Playlist
Sophia Loren named guest of honour and Kieslowski returns to Cannes Film Festival. No 35mm prints to be screened for the first time.
The Cannes Classics line-up of film masterpieces, presented in restored prints, has been announced. The programme comprises 22 features and two documentaries, screened in either 2K or 4K. But for the first time no 35mm print will be screened at Cannes Classics “with regret for some or with celebration for others”, according to a statement.
Guest of honour will be Sophia Loren, who won the award for Best Actress at Cannes in 1961 and was president of the jury in 1966. She will be present at the screening of La Voce Humana (2014), directed by Edoardo Ponti, which marks her return to movies.
That same evening, a 4K restoration of 1964 film Marriage Italian Style (Matrimonio all’italiana) by Vittorio De Sica will be screened.
Loren has also accepted to give a masterclass - a conversation which will take...
The Cannes Classics line-up of film masterpieces, presented in restored prints, has been announced. The programme comprises 22 features and two documentaries, screened in either 2K or 4K. But for the first time no 35mm print will be screened at Cannes Classics “with regret for some or with celebration for others”, according to a statement.
Guest of honour will be Sophia Loren, who won the award for Best Actress at Cannes in 1961 and was president of the jury in 1966. She will be present at the screening of La Voce Humana (2014), directed by Edoardo Ponti, which marks her return to movies.
That same evening, a 4K restoration of 1964 film Marriage Italian Style (Matrimonio all’italiana) by Vittorio De Sica will be screened.
Loren has also accepted to give a masterclass - a conversation which will take...
- 4/30/2014
- by michael.rosser@screendaily.com (Michael Rosser)
- ScreenDaily
The bloodless Cahiers du cinéma wars induced a vague but hugely influential criterion for what was to be considered good and bad in film. Elaborate sets, one of French cinema’s major traits that, in certain genres, could compete with Hollywood, were deemed stifling and were rejected in favor of urban spaces and real locations.
The infamy that Cahiers du cinéma’s critical bombardment brought to certain filmmakers, at least among a small circle of cinephiles, took years to reverse. While Cahiers du cinéma happened to be more generous to American cinema, fewer French directors were allowed to enter their cannon. If, for instance, one Robert Bresson did, otherwise many Jean Delannoys did not. While the art of some great filmmakers was acknowledged and they were given the throne, many others, who were less stylistically consistent, fell into oblivion.
Today, more than half a century after the Cahiers wars, and regardless of their accomplishments,...
The infamy that Cahiers du cinéma’s critical bombardment brought to certain filmmakers, at least among a small circle of cinephiles, took years to reverse. While Cahiers du cinéma happened to be more generous to American cinema, fewer French directors were allowed to enter their cannon. If, for instance, one Robert Bresson did, otherwise many Jean Delannoys did not. While the art of some great filmmakers was acknowledged and they were given the throne, many others, who were less stylistically consistent, fell into oblivion.
Today, more than half a century after the Cahiers wars, and regardless of their accomplishments,...
- 12/30/2013
- by Ehsan Khoshbakht
- MUBI
A couple of months ago I featured some exquisite silkscreened King Kong prints designed by the British design studio La Boca. I’ve been following La Boca’s work for the past few years and so I thought a great way to end the year would be to ask the founder of La Boca, Scot Bendall, to talk about some of their influences by sharing with us his ten favorite movie posters of all time.
Scot chose ten posters that have meaning for them as designers. “I think there have been better, and more successful, poster designs for sure—I mean, there isn’t one Saul Bass here for example!—but, the only way I could wrangle down to ten was by selecting posters that have had some personal resonance to our work. I’m also a (very amateur) Czech/Polish poster collector, so they feature quite prominently.”
Here are...
Scot chose ten posters that have meaning for them as designers. “I think there have been better, and more successful, poster designs for sure—I mean, there isn’t one Saul Bass here for example!—but, the only way I could wrangle down to ten was by selecting posters that have had some personal resonance to our work. I’m also a (very amateur) Czech/Polish poster collector, so they feature quite prominently.”
Here are...
- 12/20/2013
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
My, those Cinema St. Louis guys are tres occupé! Hot off the heels of their Q-Fest (the St. Louis Gay and Lesbian Film Festival), the Classic French Film Festival starts up this week at the same location. Discover the French culture! The Classic French Film Festival is sponsored by TV5MONDE USA , the French channel in the Us. I’ve never watched it but I’m sure it’s very French!
A downloadable Pdf of the fest’s program can be found Here
http://www.cinemastlouis.org/sites/default/files/downloads/2013/fffest2013_3lores.pdf
The Cinema St. Louis page about the event is Here
http://www.cinemastlouis.org/classic-french-film-festival
All films will be shown in the Winifred Moore Auditorium, Webster University’s Webster Hall, 470 E. Lockwood Ave.
$12 general admission, $10 for students and Cinema St. Louis members, free for Webster U. students
This is the Fifth Annual Classic French Film Festival,...
A downloadable Pdf of the fest’s program can be found Here
http://www.cinemastlouis.org/sites/default/files/downloads/2013/fffest2013_3lores.pdf
The Cinema St. Louis page about the event is Here
http://www.cinemastlouis.org/classic-french-film-festival
All films will be shown in the Winifred Moore Auditorium, Webster University’s Webster Hall, 470 E. Lockwood Ave.
$12 general admission, $10 for students and Cinema St. Louis members, free for Webster U. students
This is the Fifth Annual Classic French Film Festival,...
- 6/10/2013
- by Tom Stockman
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Above: Gustav Mezey three-sheet poster for Le Rosier de Madame Husson (Bernard Deschamps, France, 1932).
This stunning Austrian deco poster, which I came across on a Berlin antiquarian site, stands a magnificent 9 foot tall (110" x 49" to be precise) and comes in three sections. The poster is for a 1932 French film, whose German title, Der Tugendkönig, translates as “The Virtue King.” In the Us the film was titled He (or He - the Virgin Man), but the original title is Le Rosier de Madame Husson. Based on an 1887 Maupassant novella of the same name, the story concerns the titular Mme. Husson who seeks to promote chastity in her village by crowning a rosière, or a Rose Queen: a girl of unimpeachable virtue. But when none of the young women in town are equal to the title she selects the village idiot (played in the film by Fernandel) as her rosier.
Above: Roger...
This stunning Austrian deco poster, which I came across on a Berlin antiquarian site, stands a magnificent 9 foot tall (110" x 49" to be precise) and comes in three sections. The poster is for a 1932 French film, whose German title, Der Tugendkönig, translates as “The Virtue King.” In the Us the film was titled He (or He - the Virgin Man), but the original title is Le Rosier de Madame Husson. Based on an 1887 Maupassant novella of the same name, the story concerns the titular Mme. Husson who seeks to promote chastity in her village by crowning a rosière, or a Rose Queen: a girl of unimpeachable virtue. But when none of the young women in town are equal to the title she selects the village idiot (played in the film by Fernandel) as her rosier.
Above: Roger...
- 4/12/2013
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
I grew up on the 1935 Hollywood version of Les Misérables that starred Fredric March and Charles Laughton, and I still think of it fondly. I also like the Claude Lelouch film of 1995, a variation on Victor Hugo’s novel with Jean-Paul Belmondo in the leading role. But I just viewed an epic three-part French adaptation from 1934 that’s in a class by itself. It runs four hours and forty-one minutes and is well worth the investment of time. The Criterion Collection released it five years ago in an Eclipse set honoring director Raymond Bernard; the companion feature is his 1932 anti-war film Wooden Crosses. To quote the Criterion liner notes, “It was Bernard who...
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[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]...
- 12/28/2012
- by Leonard Maltin
- Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy
Above: Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, Ussr, 1925). Poster by the Stenberg brothers.
On November 1st, at Christie’s Auction House in London, a remarkable sale will take place under the banner “Vintage Posters” of 13 original Stenberg brothers film posters from the 1920s and 5 original “maquettes” or mock-up sketches. I have written about the Stenbergs a couple of times before, but although their fame is prodigious (they had a landmark exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1997), original copies of their posters rarely come up for sale, let alone their original sketches.
The jewels in this crown are the posters for Battleship Potemkin and Man with a Movie Camera, which, according to Christie’s, may never have come up for auction before. Their sales estimates are between $96,000 and $128,000, which would put them among the top 20 most expensive movie posters of all time.
Above: Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, Ussr,...
On November 1st, at Christie’s Auction House in London, a remarkable sale will take place under the banner “Vintage Posters” of 13 original Stenberg brothers film posters from the 1920s and 5 original “maquettes” or mock-up sketches. I have written about the Stenbergs a couple of times before, but although their fame is prodigious (they had a landmark exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1997), original copies of their posters rarely come up for sale, let alone their original sketches.
The jewels in this crown are the posters for Battleship Potemkin and Man with a Movie Camera, which, according to Christie’s, may never have come up for auction before. Their sales estimates are between $96,000 and $128,000, which would put them among the top 20 most expensive movie posters of all time.
Above: Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, Ussr,...
- 10/26/2012
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
These two posters for the same film—compositionally identical but stylistically so different—are the work of two of the greatest and most prolific poster artists of the 20th Century: the Russian-born, French-naturalized Boris Grinsson and the Italian Anselmo Ballester.
The film in question, Judgment of God, is a medieval drama based on the 15th century German legend of Agnes Bernauer, a commoner who married a Bavarian Prince and was accused of witchcraft by his disapproving father. Released in 1952, it was directed by Raymond Bernard (1891-1977), who is best known for his 1924 Miracle of the Wolves (another medieval saga). The Criterion Collection, who released two of his 1930s films under their Eclipse label, calls Bernard “one of the greatest and least-known directors of all time.”
The two posters were either based on the same production still—though to me that seems unlikely since it seems to be a composite...
The film in question, Judgment of God, is a medieval drama based on the 15th century German legend of Agnes Bernauer, a commoner who married a Bavarian Prince and was accused of witchcraft by his disapproving father. Released in 1952, it was directed by Raymond Bernard (1891-1977), who is best known for his 1924 Miracle of the Wolves (another medieval saga). The Criterion Collection, who released two of his 1930s films under their Eclipse label, calls Bernard “one of the greatest and least-known directors of all time.”
The two posters were either based on the same production still—though to me that seems unlikely since it seems to be a composite...
- 6/15/2012
- MUBI
The fourth in a short series celebrating the films of the Pathé-Natan company, 1926-1934.
Apart from the innovative films of Gremillon and Ozep, and the super-epics of Raymond Bernard (available from Criterion), Pathé-Natan produced a lot of slick commercial properties decorated with much the same kind of melodrama and glamor as Hollywood movies of the era.
L'équipage (1935) was one of the last Pathé-Natan productions before the studio went bankrupt amid charges of swindling and mismanagement, and they spent lavishly on it. By now, the influx of German talent that had contributed much to the style of French cinema had become a massive flood, as the Nazis had banned Jews from working in cinema. A talent exodus resulted, and Paris was the first stop for nearly everybody. And so Anatole Litvak, eventually bound for Hollywood, pitched up in the City of Light, where, for instance, he made Mayerling...
Apart from the innovative films of Gremillon and Ozep, and the super-epics of Raymond Bernard (available from Criterion), Pathé-Natan produced a lot of slick commercial properties decorated with much the same kind of melodrama and glamor as Hollywood movies of the era.
L'équipage (1935) was one of the last Pathé-Natan productions before the studio went bankrupt amid charges of swindling and mismanagement, and they spent lavishly on it. By now, the influx of German talent that had contributed much to the style of French cinema had become a massive flood, as the Nazis had banned Jews from working in cinema. A talent exodus resulted, and Paris was the first stop for nearly everybody. And so Anatole Litvak, eventually bound for Hollywood, pitched up in the City of Light, where, for instance, he made Mayerling...
- 3/29/2012
- MUBI
As promised, here are some more of my favorite posters by the amazing Stenberg brothers.
The enormous 81 inch square poster for Miss Mend (Boris Barnet & Fyodor Otsep, Ussr, 1926) promises the thrills and spills (as well as a fair share of capitalist indifference) of this epic, four hour long adventure serial, which is one of the few films promoted by the Stenbergs that has actually survived. Set partially in an imagined America, the film was based on a serialized detective novel written by Marietta Shaginian under the yankee nom-de-plume "Jim Dollar." The film, which follows three reporters and an American office girl attempting to stop a biological attack by a cabal of western business leaders determined to wipe the Soviet Union off the face of the earth, was one of the most popular Soviet films of the 1920s although it was condemned by the Soviet press of the time as lightweight "Western-style" entertainment.
The enormous 81 inch square poster for Miss Mend (Boris Barnet & Fyodor Otsep, Ussr, 1926) promises the thrills and spills (as well as a fair share of capitalist indifference) of this epic, four hour long adventure serial, which is one of the few films promoted by the Stenbergs that has actually survived. Set partially in an imagined America, the film was based on a serialized detective novel written by Marietta Shaginian under the yankee nom-de-plume "Jim Dollar." The film, which follows three reporters and an American office girl attempting to stop a biological attack by a cabal of western business leaders determined to wipe the Soviet Union off the face of the earth, was one of the most popular Soviet films of the 1920s although it was condemned by the Soviet press of the time as lightweight "Western-style" entertainment.
- 8/12/2011
- MUBI
There are Tons of new releases this past week, and as my co-host and friend Travis George said, it was going to be a hell of a time to write these up for all of you people out there who want to know about Criterion’s blossoming Hulu Plus page. And as usual, I’m elated to tell you all about these films, especially if you want to join up to the service, which helps us keep this weekly article series going. I mean, come on, there’s an Ingmar Bergman film that’s not in the collection yet! More on that at the end of the article. So let’s get right to it then.
The epic film The Human Condition (1959) has been put up, separated into three videos. Parts 1 & 2, Parts 3 & 4 and Parts 5 & 6 are there for your ease of watching, so if you have 574 minutes to kill watching the...
The epic film The Human Condition (1959) has been put up, separated into three videos. Parts 1 & 2, Parts 3 & 4 and Parts 5 & 6 are there for your ease of watching, so if you have 574 minutes to kill watching the...
- 6/12/2011
- by James McCormick
- CriterionCast
The Cannes Film Festival's unveiled its Classics program today: "Fourteen films, five documentaries, surprises, a Masterclass (Malcolm McDowell), new or restored prints: The program is based on proposals from national archives, cinematheques, studios, producers and distributors. Rare classics to discover or re-discover, they will be presented in 35mm or high definition digital prints."
The Films
The first round of descriptions comes straight from the Festival.
A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune) by Georges Méliès (France, 1902, 16'). "The color version of Georges Méliès most famous film, A Trip to the Moon (1902) is visible again 109 years after its release: having been long considered lost, this version was found in 1993 in Barcelona. In 2010, a full restoration is initiated by Lobster Films, Gan Foundation for Cinema and Technicolor Foundation for Heritage Cinema. The digital tools of today allows them to re-assemble the fragments of 13 375 images from the film and restore them one by one.
The Films
The first round of descriptions comes straight from the Festival.
A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune) by Georges Méliès (France, 1902, 16'). "The color version of Georges Méliès most famous film, A Trip to the Moon (1902) is visible again 109 years after its release: having been long considered lost, this version was found in 1993 in Barcelona. In 2010, a full restoration is initiated by Lobster Films, Gan Foundation for Cinema and Technicolor Foundation for Heritage Cinema. The digital tools of today allows them to re-assemble the fragments of 13 375 images from the film and restore them one by one.
- 4/26/2011
- MUBI
Cannes Classics is a recent addition to the festival, and will enjoy its 8th instalment this year. Part of the line-up of this section of the fest is screened at Ceinema de la Plage, that’s right, on the beach. You’ve got to admit that it’s pretty cool – an open-aired screening of a classic film on the French Riviera, away from the exclusivity of the Palais, and able to be enjoyed by Panini-eating passers-by on the Croisette. There should be more of this at the festival, it’s good for the soul.
This year’s line-up of films includes work by Stanley Kubrick, Bernardo Bertolucci, Euzhan Palcy (currently being honored by MoMA in New York) and Jerry Schatzberg, whose photograph of Faye Dunaway is embedded into this year’s festival poster above.
Robert DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal will present a screening of “A Bronx Tale” to celebrate ten...
This year’s line-up of films includes work by Stanley Kubrick, Bernardo Bertolucci, Euzhan Palcy (currently being honored by MoMA in New York) and Jerry Schatzberg, whose photograph of Faye Dunaway is embedded into this year’s festival poster above.
Robert DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal will present a screening of “A Bronx Tale” to celebrate ten...
- 4/26/2011
- by admin
- Moving Pictures Network
Cannes Classics is a recent addition to the festival, and will enjoy its 8th instalment this year. Part of the line-up of this section of the fest is screened at Ceinema de la Plage, that’s right, on the beach. You’ve got to admit that it’s pretty cool – an open-aired screening of a classic film on the French Riviera, away from the exclusivity of the Palais, and able to be enjoyed by Panini-eating passers-by on the Croisette. There should be more of this at the festival, it’s good for the soul.
This year’s line-up of films includes work by Stanley Kubrick, Bernardo Bertolucci, Euzhan Palcy (currently being honored by MoMA in New York) and Jerry Schatzberg, whose photograph of Faye Dunaway is embedded into this year’s festival poster above.
Robert DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal will present a screening of “A Bronx Tale” to celebrate ten...
This year’s line-up of films includes work by Stanley Kubrick, Bernardo Bertolucci, Euzhan Palcy (currently being honored by MoMA in New York) and Jerry Schatzberg, whose photograph of Faye Dunaway is embedded into this year’s festival poster above.
Robert DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal will present a screening of “A Bronx Tale” to celebrate ten...
- 4/26/2011
- by admin
- Moving Pictures Magazine
It’s a silly story, only possible with music.
After spending last weekend immersed in the horrors of trench warfare, World War I style, via Raymond Bernard’s Wooden Crosses, I’m in the mood for something light and frivolous – how about a romantic comedy, a musical one at that? Sure – Criterion’s Eclipse series has got just the thing for me, in Eclipse Series 8: Lubitsch Musicals. But which one of the four best fits the occasion? Well, it’s the first weekend of June, that time of year when blissful young couples traditionally get married, a custom going back to ancient Roman times when Juno was paid special homage as the goddess of marriage. Of course, June weddings also have the practical advantage of ensuring that if the bride gets pregnant on the honeymoon, she won’t be ready to give birth until after the harvest time, and...
After spending last weekend immersed in the horrors of trench warfare, World War I style, via Raymond Bernard’s Wooden Crosses, I’m in the mood for something light and frivolous – how about a romantic comedy, a musical one at that? Sure – Criterion’s Eclipse series has got just the thing for me, in Eclipse Series 8: Lubitsch Musicals. But which one of the four best fits the occasion? Well, it’s the first weekend of June, that time of year when blissful young couples traditionally get married, a custom going back to ancient Roman times when Juno was paid special homage as the goddess of marriage. Of course, June weddings also have the practical advantage of ensuring that if the bride gets pregnant on the honeymoon, she won’t be ready to give birth until after the harvest time, and...
- 6/8/2010
- by David Blakeslee
- CriterionCast
This column will feature, on a weekly basis, a different film from the Eclipse Series box sets, rotating each week between releases.
You’ll get your cross
it might be bronze, or it might be wood
but, you’ll get your cross.
Given a free choice to watch any movie I’d like, typically I’m not likely to select one about war, particularly the kind that focus on lurid, glossy battle scenes featuring the latest and greatest in pyrotechnic effects or revel in free-flowing machismo unleashed. Politically speaking, my temperament and values rest squarely in the antiwar camp, and I always advocate for non-violent conflict resolution, not merely as a strategic option but as a way of life. Yet having said that, I’ve seen films like Blackhawk Down, Saving Private Ryan and 300 early in their theatrical runs, most often due to a sense that these films deliver some...
You’ll get your cross
it might be bronze, or it might be wood
but, you’ll get your cross.
Given a free choice to watch any movie I’d like, typically I’m not likely to select one about war, particularly the kind that focus on lurid, glossy battle scenes featuring the latest and greatest in pyrotechnic effects or revel in free-flowing machismo unleashed. Politically speaking, my temperament and values rest squarely in the antiwar camp, and I always advocate for non-violent conflict resolution, not merely as a strategic option but as a way of life. Yet having said that, I’ve seen films like Blackhawk Down, Saving Private Ryan and 300 early in their theatrical runs, most often due to a sense that these films deliver some...
- 6/1/2010
- by David Blakeslee
- CriterionCast
Criterion does it again, rescuing a major filmmaker from the quicksand of neglect, happenstance and/or canonical prejudice, and shoving them into the spotlight with state-of-the-art DVD releases that virtually demand a reevaluative reckoning. As with Larisa Shepitko, Jacques Becker, Raymond Bernard, William Klein and Jean Painlevé, you won't find mention of Hiroshi Shimizu in any major English-language film history text, and in each case the elisions are criminal. An almost exact contemporary of Ozu, Mizoguchi and Naruse, from the beginnings of their careers in the mid-to-late '20s to their last films, Shimizu echoes a good deal of their field of concerns -- the plight of women in a patriarchy, the delicacy of the unsaid, the tragic spiral of romantic melodrama -- but comes at them with a subtly distinctive way of observing his characters, similar to Ozu's rigorous restraint but freer, more organic, less "perfect" and more spontaneous.
- 3/17/2009
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
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