Paris-based international film sales company Pulsar Content has formed a strategic partnership with Digital District Entertainment, a leading post-production, VFX and production facilities company, with offices in France, Belgium and India. The partnership will create “a streamlined and cost-effective production process for international film projects,” according to a statement.
Pulsar Content’s Cannes lineup includes Un Certain Regard’s “Niki” by Céline Sallette, Antoine Chevrolliers’ “Block Pass,” premiering in Critics’ Week, and Camila Beltran’s “Mi Bestia,” premiering at Acid.
Dde’s Cannes lineup includes Julien Colonna’s “Le Royaume” in Un Certain Regard and Patricia Mazuy’s “Visiting Hours” in Directors’ Fortnight.
The companies have previously worked together on several films, including “The Deep House” by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, which sold to Blumhouse for the U.S. and Universal for international territories. They also teamed up on Edouard Salier’s “Tropic” and “Mads” by David Moreau.
Dde...
Pulsar Content’s Cannes lineup includes Un Certain Regard’s “Niki” by Céline Sallette, Antoine Chevrolliers’ “Block Pass,” premiering in Critics’ Week, and Camila Beltran’s “Mi Bestia,” premiering at Acid.
Dde’s Cannes lineup includes Julien Colonna’s “Le Royaume” in Un Certain Regard and Patricia Mazuy’s “Visiting Hours” in Directors’ Fortnight.
The companies have previously worked together on several films, including “The Deep House” by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, which sold to Blumhouse for the U.S. and Universal for international territories. They also teamed up on Edouard Salier’s “Tropic” and “Mads” by David Moreau.
Dde...
- 5/7/2024
- by Leo Barraclough and Elsa Keslassy
- Variety Film + TV
The question of who will continue the legacy of the 4Ks and particularly their successes on the international movie scene is one of the most dominant in the discussions among critics and scholars of Japanese cinema. Following the 2016 Un Certain Regard Jury Prize for “Harmonium”, one of the names that provides an answer to the aforementioned question is that of Koji Fukada. In the following text, we will take a closer and more thorough look at all the elements that make the 1980 born filmmaker a worthy successor of the aforementioned masters, starting from the very beginning of his life.
Born in Tokyo in Tokyo on January 5, 1980, Koji Fukada had a father who was a film buff, which resulted in him growing up in an environment surrounded with hundreds of VHS tapes, and subsequently, to become a cineaste, just like his old man. He watched the movies that inspired him to...
Born in Tokyo in Tokyo on January 5, 1980, Koji Fukada had a father who was a film buff, which resulted in him growing up in an environment surrounded with hundreds of VHS tapes, and subsequently, to become a cineaste, just like his old man. He watched the movies that inspired him to...
- 3/30/2024
- by Panos Kotzathanasis
- AsianMoviePulse
French mini-major Pathé has acquired Les Films des Tournelles, the production company founded by Anne-Dominique Toussaint whose recent credits include Louis Garrel’s Cesar-winning “The Innocent.”
Besides Garrel, Les Films des Tournelles has worked with a flurry of auteurs on some of their most successful films, including Riad Sattouf’s “The French Kissers,” which won the Cesar for best first film in 2010; Nadine Labaki’s “Caramel”; Emanuele Crialese’s “Respiro”; Valeria Golino’s “Miele”; and Mona Achache’s “The Hedgehog.” “The Innocent” won two prizes at last year’s Cesar Awards and screened at Cannes on the 75th anniversary of the festival.
Toussaint has also worked with Philippe Le Guay and Emmanuel Carrère. Toussaint, whose career spans over three decades, has produced 27 films so far, including iconic French movies such as Martine Dugowson’s “Mina Tannenbaum.”
As part of the deal, Pathé is acquiring Films des Tournelles’ full library while...
Besides Garrel, Les Films des Tournelles has worked with a flurry of auteurs on some of their most successful films, including Riad Sattouf’s “The French Kissers,” which won the Cesar for best first film in 2010; Nadine Labaki’s “Caramel”; Emanuele Crialese’s “Respiro”; Valeria Golino’s “Miele”; and Mona Achache’s “The Hedgehog.” “The Innocent” won two prizes at last year’s Cesar Awards and screened at Cannes on the 75th anniversary of the festival.
Toussaint has also worked with Philippe Le Guay and Emmanuel Carrère. Toussaint, whose career spans over three decades, has produced 27 films so far, including iconic French movies such as Martine Dugowson’s “Mina Tannenbaum.”
As part of the deal, Pathé is acquiring Films des Tournelles’ full library while...
- 1/25/2024
- by Elsa Keslassy
- Variety Film + TV
The 80th annual Venice Film Festival launches on the Lido on August 30. This edition features a slew of Oscar hopefuls including Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro,” David Fincher’s “The Killer,” Yorgas Lanthimos’ “Poor Things” and Michael Mann’s “Ferrari.” They’re all vying for the top prize, the Golden Lion.
Seventy years ago, there were four now-classics in competition: William Wyler’s “Roman Holiday,” for which Audrey Hepburn would win Oscar, John Huston’s “Moulin Rouge,” Samuel Fuller’s “Pickup on South Street” and Vincente Minnelli’s “The Bad and the Beautiful,” which had recently picked up five Oscars. But the Golden Lion didn’t roar at the 14th edition of the international film festival.
The jury headed by future Nobel Prize laureate in literature Eugenio Montale just couldn’t decide on the best of the fest because according to the New York Times “the quality...
Seventy years ago, there were four now-classics in competition: William Wyler’s “Roman Holiday,” for which Audrey Hepburn would win Oscar, John Huston’s “Moulin Rouge,” Samuel Fuller’s “Pickup on South Street” and Vincente Minnelli’s “The Bad and the Beautiful,” which had recently picked up five Oscars. But the Golden Lion didn’t roar at the 14th edition of the international film festival.
The jury headed by future Nobel Prize laureate in literature Eugenio Montale just couldn’t decide on the best of the fest because according to the New York Times “the quality...
- 8/29/2023
- by Susan King
- Gold Derby
Take a refreshing plunge into classic French Poetic Realism — pre-noir drama with softer edges and a touch of romantic fatalism. A low-rent hotel on a barge canal is the gathering point for a cross-section of quasi- undesirables. Scandals and crimes aside, they’re a touching, human bunch, as performed to perfection by Louis Jouvet, Annabella, Arletty, Jane Marken, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Paulette Dubost and Bernard Blier. Marcel Carné’s show is also a beautiful production, with Alexandre Trauner designs that recreate ‘reality’ on an enormous scale.
Hôtel du Nord
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1139
1938 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 96 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date August 23, 2022 / 39.95
Starring: Annabella, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Louis Jouvet, Arletty, Paulette Dubost, Andrex, André Brunot, Henri Bosc, Marcel André, Bernard Blier, Jane Marken, François Périer, Dora Doll, Raymone.
Cinematography: Louis Née, Armand Thirard
Production Designer and Art Director: Alexandre Trauner
Film Editor: Marthe Gottie
Original Music: Maurice Jaubert
Written by Henri Jeanson,...
Hôtel du Nord
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1139
1938 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 96 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date August 23, 2022 / 39.95
Starring: Annabella, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Louis Jouvet, Arletty, Paulette Dubost, Andrex, André Brunot, Henri Bosc, Marcel André, Bernard Blier, Jane Marken, François Périer, Dora Doll, Raymone.
Cinematography: Louis Née, Armand Thirard
Production Designer and Art Director: Alexandre Trauner
Film Editor: Marthe Gottie
Original Music: Maurice Jaubert
Written by Henri Jeanson,...
- 8/23/2022
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Paris is arguably the most romanticized city in the world, and no wonder, given the music, the wine, the food, and the stereotype of all of these things being enjoyed by all citizens all the time. Much of early 20th century cinema also tended to romanticize the working classes, and while there is some reasonable criticism that could be leveled at that portrayal, it's hard not to be lulled into it with films such as Marcel Carné's Hotel du Nord. This is not to suggest that Carné was being unrealistic in his portrayal of the world in which the labourers moved; more that, there is a reason this type of film is called 'poetic realism'. Set on the banks of...
[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...
[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...
- 8/9/2022
- Screen Anarchy
Following one of their better months of late, Criterion ring in the second half of 2022 (I know) with a pendulum swing between recent cult favorites and pre-war noir, with a Sidney Poitier western in-between for good measure. A little “oh wow” escaped me seeing they’ll release Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland, a new entry in the feel-bad canon and fine companion to Josh and Benny Safdie’s Daddy Longlegs; at least both have fittingly off-putting cover art.
Sidney Poitier’s Buck and the Preacher gets a well-stocked disc to nicely boost a film I rarely (probably for no good reason) hear word of, while last year’s Faya dayi gets its own canonization with a disc emphasizing director Jessica Beshir’s career to date. And Marcel Carné’s Hôtel du Nord? Unseen by me, but come on—look at that cover. Of course I’m going to love it.
See...
Sidney Poitier’s Buck and the Preacher gets a well-stocked disc to nicely boost a film I rarely (probably for no good reason) hear word of, while last year’s Faya dayi gets its own canonization with a disc emphasizing director Jessica Beshir’s career to date. And Marcel Carné’s Hôtel du Nord? Unseen by me, but come on—look at that cover. Of course I’m going to love it.
See...
- 5/16/2022
- by Leonard Pearce
- The Film Stage
Koji Fukada was born in Tokyo in 1980. In love with European cinema, he is very influenced by Marcel Carné and Victor Erice. While studiyng Litterature at the Taisho University, he took lessons of cinema direction at the Tokyo Film School, where one of his teacher was Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Fukada directed his first feature film in 2001, “The Chair”. In 2020, he is back with “The Real Thing”, based on the comic by Mochiru Hoshisato, and presented as a premiere in Vesoul, in two parts.
On the occasion of his presence in Fica Vesoul, we speak with him about rewatching his older films, his preference between Japanese and French cinema, the effect theater had on his filmmaking, Kanji Furutachi and Bryerly Long, and many other topics.
Translation by Lea Le Dimna
This morning, you watched “Human Comedy in Tokyo”, a film you shot in 2008. How does that make you feel?
It does not...
On the occasion of his presence in Fica Vesoul, we speak with him about rewatching his older films, his preference between Japanese and French cinema, the effect theater had on his filmmaking, Kanji Furutachi and Bryerly Long, and many other topics.
Translation by Lea Le Dimna
This morning, you watched “Human Comedy in Tokyo”, a film you shot in 2008. How does that make you feel?
It does not...
- 2/5/2022
- by Panos Kotzathanasis
- AsianMoviePulse
Above: 1962 poster for The Human Condition III: A Soldier’s Prayer.The extraordinary German graphic designer Hans Hillmann (1925–2014) should need no introduction to readers of this column: I’ve written about him on a number of occasions and anyone who loves movie poster design should know his name. For a long time, however, it has been hard to find a lot of his work online, certainly not all in one place. For a while I had entertained the idea of trying to collect images of every single movie poster he ever designed and ranking them from best to least-best. But I knew that even if I could gather together his more than 160 posters that I would tie myself in knots trying to put them in any kind of order.Thankfully author and publisher Jens Müller has done half of the work for me. Müller had first met Hillmann when he curated...
- 3/19/2021
- MUBI
Normal 0 false false false En-us X-none X-none
By Hank Reineke
In March of 2019 I took a drive to the Hudson River town of Nyack, New York, for a rare public screening of Bob Dylan’s ill-fated cinematic opus Renaldo & Clara. The film, originally released to art houses in New York City and Los Angeles January of 1978, was mercilessly panned. The movie – shot during Dylan’s fabled autumn 1975 tour with his ragtag Rolling Thunder Revue – all but disappeared from cinemas and, mostly, from public consciousness within the span of a few weeks. The original cut of the film was, let’s charitably say, a rambling affair, clocking in at just under four hours.
Dylan would tell his co-writer, the playwright Sam Shepard, that he was looking to model his film after a pair of French classics: Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise) (1945) and Francois Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Or,...
By Hank Reineke
In March of 2019 I took a drive to the Hudson River town of Nyack, New York, for a rare public screening of Bob Dylan’s ill-fated cinematic opus Renaldo & Clara. The film, originally released to art houses in New York City and Los Angeles January of 1978, was mercilessly panned. The movie – shot during Dylan’s fabled autumn 1975 tour with his ragtag Rolling Thunder Revue – all but disappeared from cinemas and, mostly, from public consciousness within the span of a few weeks. The original cut of the film was, let’s charitably say, a rambling affair, clocking in at just under four hours.
Dylan would tell his co-writer, the playwright Sam Shepard, that he was looking to model his film after a pair of French classics: Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise) (1945) and Francois Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Or,...
- 1/25/2021
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
Goldfinger actress and model Margaret Nolan died on October 5. She was 76.
Nolan was known as the gold-painted model in the memorable title sequence for the 1964 James Bond film in which she also played Bond’s masseuse Dink. In the same year, she also appeared in the popular Beatles pic A Hard Day’s Night Night. In addition, she was seen in the Carry On franchise from 1965 through 1974. She also appeared in Spike Milligan’s Q series as well as the film Ferry Cross the Mersey and Marcel Carné’s 1965 pic Three Rooms in Manhattan. She also appeared in the 2011 Yvonne Deutschman comedy The Power of Three.
Most recently Edgar Wright cast her in his upcoming film Last Night in Soho which will be released by Focus Features on April 23, 2021. Wright took to Twitter to pay tribute to the actress and model. “It’s my sad duty to report that actress and artist,...
Nolan was known as the gold-painted model in the memorable title sequence for the 1964 James Bond film in which she also played Bond’s masseuse Dink. In the same year, she also appeared in the popular Beatles pic A Hard Day’s Night Night. In addition, she was seen in the Carry On franchise from 1965 through 1974. She also appeared in Spike Milligan’s Q series as well as the film Ferry Cross the Mersey and Marcel Carné’s 1965 pic Three Rooms in Manhattan. She also appeared in the 2011 Yvonne Deutschman comedy The Power of Three.
Most recently Edgar Wright cast her in his upcoming film Last Night in Soho which will be released by Focus Features on April 23, 2021. Wright took to Twitter to pay tribute to the actress and model. “It’s my sad duty to report that actress and artist,...
- 10/11/2020
- by Dino-Ray Ramos
- Deadline Film + TV
Margaret Nolan, an actress and artist known as the gold-painted model in the title sequence for the 1964 James Bond film “Goldfinger,” died Oct. 5, her son, Oscar Deeks, confirmed to Variety. She was 76.
Director Edgar Wright first announced the news of Nolan’s death on Twitter. In a touching tribute, Wright wrote: “She was the middle of Venn diagram of everything cool in the 60’s; having appeared with the Beatles, been beyond iconic in Bond and been part of the ‘Carry On’ cast too.”
She was the gold painted model in the iconic Goldfinger title sequence and poster (she also played Dink in the movie), she appeared in the classic A Hard Day's Night, Carry On Girls, No Sex Please We're British & many others, frequently sending up her own glamourpuss image. 2/4 pic.twitter.com/RyUs7fS6P7
— edgarwright (@edgarwright) October 11, 2020
Nolan was born on Oct. 29, 1943 in Somerset, England and grew up in London.
Director Edgar Wright first announced the news of Nolan’s death on Twitter. In a touching tribute, Wright wrote: “She was the middle of Venn diagram of everything cool in the 60’s; having appeared with the Beatles, been beyond iconic in Bond and been part of the ‘Carry On’ cast too.”
She was the gold painted model in the iconic Goldfinger title sequence and poster (she also played Dink in the movie), she appeared in the classic A Hard Day's Night, Carry On Girls, No Sex Please We're British & many others, frequently sending up her own glamourpuss image. 2/4 pic.twitter.com/RyUs7fS6P7
— edgarwright (@edgarwright) October 11, 2020
Nolan was born on Oct. 29, 1943 in Somerset, England and grew up in London.
- 10/11/2020
- by Ellise Shafer
- Variety Film + TV
Michael Lonsdale, the veteran British-French actor known for his roles in Bond movie Moonraker and thriller The Day of the Jackal, has died in Paris, his agent has confirmed to Deadline. He was 89.
Lonsdale appeared in more than 200 film and TV projects, working both in English and French.
Among his other most high-profile English-language films were drama The Remains of The Day, crime pic Ronin and historical-thriller Munich.
Born in Paris and raised on the island of Guernsey and then London, Lonsdale returned to Paris to study painting in 1947. He first appeared on stage at 24 and would go on to score roles in 1950s French genre movies.
In the 1970s, he worked with acclaimed directors including Louis Malle, Marcel Carné, Joseph Losey, Alain Resnais, Jacques Bral and Marguerite Duras. In the same decade, he was BAFTA-nominated for his supporting role in thriller The Day of the Jackal, about an attempted...
Lonsdale appeared in more than 200 film and TV projects, working both in English and French.
Among his other most high-profile English-language films were drama The Remains of The Day, crime pic Ronin and historical-thriller Munich.
Born in Paris and raised on the island of Guernsey and then London, Lonsdale returned to Paris to study painting in 1947. He first appeared on stage at 24 and would go on to score roles in 1950s French genre movies.
In the 1970s, he worked with acclaimed directors including Louis Malle, Marcel Carné, Joseph Losey, Alain Resnais, Jacques Bral and Marguerite Duras. In the same decade, he was BAFTA-nominated for his supporting role in thriller The Day of the Jackal, about an attempted...
- 9/21/2020
- by Andreas Wiseman
- Deadline Film + TV
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Max Hollein with Camp: Notes On Fashion Co-Chairs Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour, and Gucci Creative Director Alessandro Michele at the press preview Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
In Susan Sontag's Notes On 'Camp' from 1964, she counts Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble In Paradise and John Huston's The Maltese Falcon as "among the greatest camp movies ever made." Marcel Carné's Drôle De Drame, Greta Garbo, Jean Cocteau, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Jane Russell, Gina Lollobrigida, Victor Mature, Virginia Mayo, Tallulah Bankhead, Jayne Mansfield, Mae West, Edward Everett Horton, and Anita Ekberg's performance in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita are noted by her for their camp appeal.
Andrew Bolton when I asked him "Are dachshunds particularly Camp?": "Oh absolutely!" Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Baz Luhrmann, Sienna Miller, Lupita Nyong'o, Emily Blunt, Elle Fanning, Emma Stone, Naomi Campbell, Ezra Miller, Cara Delevingne, Celine Dion, Bette Midler,...
In Susan Sontag's Notes On 'Camp' from 1964, she counts Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble In Paradise and John Huston's The Maltese Falcon as "among the greatest camp movies ever made." Marcel Carné's Drôle De Drame, Greta Garbo, Jean Cocteau, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Jane Russell, Gina Lollobrigida, Victor Mature, Virginia Mayo, Tallulah Bankhead, Jayne Mansfield, Mae West, Edward Everett Horton, and Anita Ekberg's performance in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita are noted by her for their camp appeal.
Andrew Bolton when I asked him "Are dachshunds particularly Camp?": "Oh absolutely!" Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Baz Luhrmann, Sienna Miller, Lupita Nyong'o, Emily Blunt, Elle Fanning, Emma Stone, Naomi Campbell, Ezra Miller, Cara Delevingne, Celine Dion, Bette Midler,...
- 5/7/2019
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
After delivering the Netflix original series “The Spy” with Sacha Baron Cohen, Alain Goldman’s Paris-based company, Legende, is on track to produce three more premium drama series: Yehonatan Indursky’s “Shtetl,” Olivier Dahan and Frédéric Krivine’s “Les Enfants du Paradis” (working title), and “Ulysse.”
“Les Enfants du Paradis” is being developed by Krivine, the creative force behind the long-running series “Un Village Francais,” and will explore the lives of artists, including Coco Chanel, Arletty and Jean Gabin, during the Nazi occupation of France. Dahan, the director of the Marion Cotillard-starrer “La Vie en Rose,” is attached to co-write and helm the series.
“‘Les Enfants du Paradis’ will shed light on the world of artists during World War II when Paris was occupied by the Germans, and will be backed by meticulous research as we’ll aim to stick to what happened during those years and portray the artists as they were.
“Les Enfants du Paradis” is being developed by Krivine, the creative force behind the long-running series “Un Village Francais,” and will explore the lives of artists, including Coco Chanel, Arletty and Jean Gabin, during the Nazi occupation of France. Dahan, the director of the Marion Cotillard-starrer “La Vie en Rose,” is attached to co-write and helm the series.
“‘Les Enfants du Paradis’ will shed light on the world of artists during World War II when Paris was occupied by the Germans, and will be backed by meticulous research as we’ll aim to stick to what happened during those years and portray the artists as they were.
- 3/27/2019
- by Elsa Keslassy
- Variety Film + TV
It’s a dream come true for Terry Gilliam fans: after 25 years of false starts, budget shortfalls, major casting changes, and flooded sets, “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” is finally here. But when it screened for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival in May, many critics thought it was less a grand slam and more of a bunt.
IndieWire’s Chief Critic Eric Kohn was more generous in his B- review, calling it “sloppy” but “far from a total disappointment” and ultimately concluding that it may be “Gilliam’s most personal film.” Unfortunately, “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” also ended up with a score of 56 on Metacritic and 61% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Gilliam knows his films divide people. Talking to Variety while promoting “Don Quixote” in Los Cabos, Mexico, the director of “Brazil” said that even with that classic movie “half the audience would walk out.”
“It doesn’t surprise me,...
IndieWire’s Chief Critic Eric Kohn was more generous in his B- review, calling it “sloppy” but “far from a total disappointment” and ultimately concluding that it may be “Gilliam’s most personal film.” Unfortunately, “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” also ended up with a score of 56 on Metacritic and 61% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Gilliam knows his films divide people. Talking to Variety while promoting “Don Quixote” in Los Cabos, Mexico, the director of “Brazil” said that even with that classic movie “half the audience would walk out.”
“It doesn’t surprise me,...
- 11/9/2018
- by Christian Blauvelt
- Indiewire
Veteran French helmer Bertrand Tavernier (“The French Minister”) is curating a 15-film retrospective of films by Henri Decoin (1890-1969), a larger-than-life character who before directing his first feature, at the age of 43, was an Olympic swimmer, Wwi pilot, sports journalist and novelist.
Decoin is one of the three directors – alongside Jean Grémillon and Max Ophuls – featured in the first episode of Tavernier’s “My Journeys Through French Cinema,” a follow-up project to his documentary “My Journey Through French Cinema”.
Tavernier believes that Decoin left a decisive mark on Gallic cinema due to the fluidity of his directing style, inspired in part by his sojourn in Hollywood in 1938, his innovative exploration of genres such as crime, espionage thrillers, historical sagas and psychological dramas, his remarkable adaptations of novels by George Simenon and his notable collaboration with actors such as Jean Gabin, Louis Jouvet and his second wife, Danielle Darrieux.
The retrospective...
Decoin is one of the three directors – alongside Jean Grémillon and Max Ophuls – featured in the first episode of Tavernier’s “My Journeys Through French Cinema,” a follow-up project to his documentary “My Journey Through French Cinema”.
Tavernier believes that Decoin left a decisive mark on Gallic cinema due to the fluidity of his directing style, inspired in part by his sojourn in Hollywood in 1938, his innovative exploration of genres such as crime, espionage thrillers, historical sagas and psychological dramas, his remarkable adaptations of novels by George Simenon and his notable collaboration with actors such as Jean Gabin, Louis Jouvet and his second wife, Danielle Darrieux.
The retrospective...
- 10/18/2018
- by Martin Dale
- Variety Film + TV
The 23rd entry in an on-going series of audiovisual essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. Mubi is showing Jean Renoir's The Testament of Dr. Cordelier (1959) is August 3 - September 2, 2017 in the United States as part of the series Jean Renoir.Jean Renoir’s The Experiment of Dr. Cordelier (a.k.a. The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment, 1959), shot using the multi-camera set-up of a television production, is a free variation on Robert Louis Stevenson’s immortal tale, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). However, Renoir’s take on this material owes less to the horror genre than to a kind of speculative, philosophical fiction. Unlike in most screen versions of the Jekyll/Hyde duality, Renoir goes easy on the conventional distinction between the good and evil sides of a single personality. Yes, the figure of Opale, into whom Cordelier transforms himself, is destructive, bestial, cruel, and sadistic.
- 8/4/2017
- MUBI
Two films by Marcel Carné are playing on Mubi in the United States as part of the series Marcel Carné, Arletty, Jean Gabin: Le jour se lève (1939), from June 7 - July 7, and Air of Paris (1954), from June 8 - July 8, 2017.Marcel Carné’s 1937 film Drôle de drame (Bizarre, Bizarre) feels anomalous when placed next to his classic dramas. Unlike the sincere emotion, heartbreak, and despair which characterize his poetic realist works, Drôle de drame is a lighthearted and rather frivolous comedy of manners. The film depicts a series of absurd events caused by a need to maintain appearances, following meek botanist Irwin Molyneux (Michel Simon) as he lives a double life, writing crime novels in secret. When his cousin, the bishop Bedford (Louis Jouvet), accuses Molyneux of having killed his wife, the married couple go into hiding rather than rectify the mistake. Molyneux emerges with his novelist persona in order...
- 6/8/2017
- MUBI
Bertrand Tavernier on Jacques Prévert and Joseph Kosma's Les Feuilles Mortes with Yves Montand in Marcel Carné's Les Portes De La Nuit: "The birth of the song. I mean, that's a good scene." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
In the second installment of my conversation with Bertrand Tavernier on his Voyage À Travers Le Cinéma Français we go towards Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait, Lino Ventura and Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean Gabin in Jean Delannoy's adaptation of Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret, Bernard Blier in Henri Verneuil's Le Président, Nadja Tiller in Gilles Grangier's Le Désordre Et La Nuit, Eddie Constantine, and composers Jean-Jacques Grunenwald, George Van Parys, and Paul Misraki.
Martin Scorsese critiquing a Robert De Niro performance in a film by another director is unimaginable to Bertrand. "Distance is important to give you a wider vision of things."
Lino Ventura to Bertrand Tavernier on...
In the second installment of my conversation with Bertrand Tavernier on his Voyage À Travers Le Cinéma Français we go towards Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait, Lino Ventura and Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean Gabin in Jean Delannoy's adaptation of Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret, Bernard Blier in Henri Verneuil's Le Président, Nadja Tiller in Gilles Grangier's Le Désordre Et La Nuit, Eddie Constantine, and composers Jean-Jacques Grunenwald, George Van Parys, and Paul Misraki.
Martin Scorsese critiquing a Robert De Niro performance in a film by another director is unimaginable to Bertrand. "Distance is important to give you a wider vision of things."
Lino Ventura to Bertrand Tavernier on...
- 4/3/2017
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
French actor best known for her role in the 1930s film Le Quai des Brumes
One of the quintessential images of pre-war French cinema was the almond-eyed Michèle Morgan, dressed in trench coat and beret, trying to grab some happiness together with the doomed army deserter, Jean Gabin, in a sombre fogbound port in Le Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938). “You have beautiful eyes, you know,” Gabin tells her. “Kiss me,” she replies.
It was the first film in which the distinctive melancholic “poetic realism” of the director Marcel Carné and the screenwriter Jacques Prévert expressed itself. The then 18-year-old Morgan had already been in pictures for three years, yet never again in her long career would she appear in a role so perfectly suited to her, that of the beautiful, mysterious waif, old beyond her years.
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One of the quintessential images of pre-war French cinema was the almond-eyed Michèle Morgan, dressed in trench coat and beret, trying to grab some happiness together with the doomed army deserter, Jean Gabin, in a sombre fogbound port in Le Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938). “You have beautiful eyes, you know,” Gabin tells her. “Kiss me,” she replies.
It was the first film in which the distinctive melancholic “poetic realism” of the director Marcel Carné and the screenwriter Jacques Prévert expressed itself. The then 18-year-old Morgan had already been in pictures for three years, yet never again in her long career would she appear in a role so perfectly suited to her, that of the beautiful, mysterious waif, old beyond her years.
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- 12/21/2016
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
Jean-Luc Godard. Robert Bresson. Éric Rohmer. Jacques Demy. Agnès Varda. Alain Resnais. Jacques Tati. François Truffaut. Louis Malle. Jean-Pierre Melville. Jacques Rivette. Claude Chabrol. Jean Vigo. Jean Cocteau. Jean Renoir. Chris Marker. Marcel Carné. Has any other country produced as many great directors a France? Knowing this full well, one of its top directors has helmed a comprehensive documentary.
Premiering at Cannes earlier this year and soon stopping by Nyff, Bertrand Tavernier‘s Journey Through French Cinema is a 190-minute trip through the history of the cinematic medium in his country. While we’re still awaiting a U.S. release date, the first trailer has now arrived hailing from — you guessed it — France, thankfully with some English subtitles, and it looks to be a delectable treat for anyone with even a passing interest in film.
Check out the trailer below, along with the trailer for a George Méliès exhibit running...
Premiering at Cannes earlier this year and soon stopping by Nyff, Bertrand Tavernier‘s Journey Through French Cinema is a 190-minute trip through the history of the cinematic medium in his country. While we’re still awaiting a U.S. release date, the first trailer has now arrived hailing from — you guessed it — France, thankfully with some English subtitles, and it looks to be a delectable treat for anyone with even a passing interest in film.
Check out the trailer below, along with the trailer for a George Méliès exhibit running...
- 10/5/2016
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Cannes head will be live-narrating his archive film Lumière! at the festival.
Cannes Film Festival chief Thierry Frémaux was a guest of the Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff) this weekend but his visit was not connected to his role as the head of the biggest and most glamorous festival in the world.
Double-hatted Frémaux was in town instead as managing director of France’s Institut Lumière in Lyon, devoted to the work of cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière and film heritage in general, which he oversees when not preparing Cannes.
He flew into Toronto do a live narration of his film Lumière! pulling together some 100 short films shot by the Lumière brothers from 1895 to 1905, which are rarely shown on the big screen today.
He spearheaded the film, producing alongside compatriot director Bertrand Tavernier (who is president of the Institut Lumière), to mark the 120th anniversary of cinema in France in 2015.
“Louis Lumière and his operators shot nearly...
Cannes Film Festival chief Thierry Frémaux was a guest of the Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff) this weekend but his visit was not connected to his role as the head of the biggest and most glamorous festival in the world.
Double-hatted Frémaux was in town instead as managing director of France’s Institut Lumière in Lyon, devoted to the work of cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière and film heritage in general, which he oversees when not preparing Cannes.
He flew into Toronto do a live narration of his film Lumière! pulling together some 100 short films shot by the Lumière brothers from 1895 to 1905, which are rarely shown on the big screen today.
He spearheaded the film, producing alongside compatriot director Bertrand Tavernier (who is president of the Institut Lumière), to mark the 120th anniversary of cinema in France in 2015.
“Louis Lumière and his operators shot nearly...
- 9/11/2016
- ScreenDaily
Here's something for hardcore cineastes: an incredible restoration of Marcel L'Herbier's avant-garde silent feature, which looks unlike any other movie of its time. The weird story is about a Swedish engineer who wins the hand of famous singer by demonstrating a machine that can revive the dead. The film's designs are by score of famous architects and art notables of the Paris art scene circa 1924. L'Inhumaine Blu-ray Flicker Alley 1924 / Color tints / 1:33 Silent Aperture / min. / Street Date March 1, 2016 / 39.95 Starring Georgette Leblanc, Jacque Catelain, Léonid Walter de Malte, Philippe Hériat, Fred Kellerman, Robert Mallet-Stevens. Cinematography Roche, Georges Specht Art Direction, design, costumes, Claude Autant-Lara, Alberto Cavalcanti, Fernand Léger, Paul Poiret, Original Music Darius Milhaud (originally), Aidje Tafial / Alloy Orchestra Written by Pierre MacOrlan, Marcel L'Herbier, Georgette Leblanc Produced and Directed by Marcel L'Herbier
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Followers of art, architecture, literature and French art movies of the early 1920s...
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Followers of art, architecture, literature and French art movies of the early 1920s...
- 2/21/2016
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Philippe Garrel. Photo by Darren Hughes.There’s no exact equivalent in film history for Philippe Garrel’s “family cinema,” as he calls it here. To immerse oneself in his work is to watch Garrel and those he loves (parents, partners, children) be transformed by age and experience, while their passions and preoccupations—that particular Garrelian amour fou—persist.After several decades during which Garrel’s films saw limited distribution and exhibition in North America, he's now experiencing something of a revival. Over the span of three days at the Toronto International Film Festival I enjoyed an impromptu Garrel family retrospective. In the Cinematheque program, Tiff debuted its recently-commissioned 35mm print of Jacques Rozier’s first film, Adieu Philippine (1962), which features a middle-aged Maurice Garrel in a supporting role. Actua 1 (1968), Philippe Garrel’s long-lost short documentary of the May ’68 protests, screened in the Wavelengths section, also in a new print.
- 1/13/2016
- by Darren Hughes
- MUBI
Before its flame was extinguished, New York’s legendary Kim’s Video contributed further to the world of cinephilia by polling better-known customers about their favorite films. One of these customers happened to be Allen Ginsberg, a figure whose relative lack of experience in cinema certainly won’t stand as any sort of qualifier. Thanks to The Allen Ginsberg Project (via Open Culture), we can now get a wider — and, to our eyes, more immediately understandable — grasp of what made this generation-defining voice tick.
Two interests — French Poetic Realism and the work of (or at least work heavily relating to) his fellow Beat poets — announce themselves rather clearly, given the fact that they arguably occupy 90% of the final list. The sole “outsider” is Battleship Potemkin, a picture that, with fierce political intentions and poetic inclinations in its cutting, nevertheless makes perfect sense as a Ginsberg favorite. Some of these are...
Two interests — French Poetic Realism and the work of (or at least work heavily relating to) his fellow Beat poets — announce themselves rather clearly, given the fact that they arguably occupy 90% of the final list. The sole “outsider” is Battleship Potemkin, a picture that, with fierce political intentions and poetic inclinations in its cutting, nevertheless makes perfect sense as a Ginsberg favorite. Some of these are...
- 12/7/2015
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Each week, the fine folks at Fandor add a number of films to their Criterion Picks area, which will then be available to subscribers for the following twelve days. This week, the Criterion Picks focus on eight delightful French films.
Three decades of exceptional French cinema in the service of that most intoxicating, unpredictable and stubborn of muscles, to which laws of convention and commitment prove no barrier: the heart.
Don’t have a Fandor subscription? They offer a free trial membership.
Children of Paradise by Marcel Carne
Poetic realism reached sublime heights with Children Of Paradise, widely considered one of the greatest French films of all time. This nimble depiction of nineteenth-century Paris’s theatrical demimonde, filmed during World War II, follows a mysterious woman loved by four different men (all based on historical figures): an actor, a criminal, a count, and, most poignantly, a mime (Jean-Louis Barrault,...
Three decades of exceptional French cinema in the service of that most intoxicating, unpredictable and stubborn of muscles, to which laws of convention and commitment prove no barrier: the heart.
Don’t have a Fandor subscription? They offer a free trial membership.
Children of Paradise by Marcel Carne
Poetic realism reached sublime heights with Children Of Paradise, widely considered one of the greatest French films of all time. This nimble depiction of nineteenth-century Paris’s theatrical demimonde, filmed during World War II, follows a mysterious woman loved by four different men (all based on historical figures): an actor, a criminal, a count, and, most poignantly, a mime (Jean-Louis Barrault,...
- 9/22/2015
- by Ryan Gallagher
- CriterionCast
Jazz music has long expressed its capacity to borrow from various, sometimes contradictory sources in order to create something which in every sense transcends the original elements. Since the earliest days of jazz as a musical form, it has been inspired by military and funeral marches; has stylishly interpreted popular songs; and even brought the classical intricacies of Wagner into the domain of swinging brasses and reeds. This multiculturalism and eclecticism of jazz likens it to cinema which, in turn, has transformed pop culture motifs into something close to the sublime and mixed ‘high’ and ‘low’ artistic gestures to remarkable effect.In the history of jazz, the evolution from ragtime or traditional tunes, to discovering the treasure trove of Broadway songs was fast and smooth. The latter influence was shared by cinema, as the history of film production quickly marched on. The emergence of ‘talkies’ in the United States meant rediscovering Broadway,...
- 6/1/2015
- by Ehsan Khoshbakht
- MUBI
Section to also include celebrations of Ingrid Bergman and Orson Welles as well as screenings of The Terminator and Jurassic Park 3D.
Costa-Gavras has been named guest of honour at this year’s Cannes Classics section of the Cannes Film Festival (May 13-24).
The Greek-French film director and producer won the Palme d’or with Missing in 1982, was member of the jury in 1976 that crowned Taxi Driver and picked up the award for best director with Section spéciale in 1975.
The filmmaker will be present for a screening of Z, which won the jury prize in 1969, and has had the original negative scanned in 4k and restored frame by frame in 2K, supervised by Costa-Gavras.
Orson Welles
Marking 100 years since the birth of Orson Welles, Cannes will screen restorations of films from the legendary Us actor, director, writer and producer, who died in 1985.
The titles include his staggering debut Citizen Kane (1941), which has received a 4k restoration completed...
Costa-Gavras has been named guest of honour at this year’s Cannes Classics section of the Cannes Film Festival (May 13-24).
The Greek-French film director and producer won the Palme d’or with Missing in 1982, was member of the jury in 1976 that crowned Taxi Driver and picked up the award for best director with Section spéciale in 1975.
The filmmaker will be present for a screening of Z, which won the jury prize in 1969, and has had the original negative scanned in 4k and restored frame by frame in 2K, supervised by Costa-Gavras.
Orson Welles
Marking 100 years since the birth of Orson Welles, Cannes will screen restorations of films from the legendary Us actor, director, writer and producer, who died in 1985.
The titles include his staggering debut Citizen Kane (1941), which has received a 4k restoration completed...
- 4/29/2015
- by michael.rosser@screendaily.com (Michael Rosser)
- ScreenDaily
In his latest delightful entry, the Austrian Film Museum's Christoph Huber considers a couple of unconventional editing techniques born of necessity. Under consideration here are Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960) and, by way of Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties (1939), Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men (1949). Also in today's roundup of news and views: Books on Zhang Yimou and Alfred Hitchcock, Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis at 70, interviews with Jacques Doillon, Peter Strickland, Veronika Lisková, Jan Soldat, Stine Marie Jacobsen, Adam Curtis, Chuck Palahniuk, Desiree Akhavan, Ira Sachs, Ben Stiller and more. » - David Hudson...
- 3/11/2015
- Keyframe
In his latest delightful entry, the Austrian Film Museum's Christoph Huber considers a couple of unconventional editing techniques born of necessity. Under consideration here are Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960) and, by way of Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties (1939), Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men (1949). Also in today's roundup of news and views: Books on Zhang Yimou and Alfred Hitchcock, Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis at 70, interviews with Jacques Doillon, Peter Strickland, Veronika Lisková, Jan Soldat, Stine Marie Jacobsen, Adam Curtis, Chuck Palahniuk, Desiree Akhavan, Ira Sachs, Ben Stiller and more. » - David Hudson...
- 3/11/2015
- Fandor: Keyframe
In his latest delightful entry, the Austrian Film Museum's Christoph Huber considers a couple of unconventional editing techniques born of necessity. Under consideration here are Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960) and, by way of Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties (1939), Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men (1949). Also in today's roundup of news and views: Books on Zhang Yimou and Alfred Hitchcock, Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis at 70, interviews with Jacques Doillon, Peter Strickland, Veronika Lisková, Jan Soldat, Stine Marie Jacobsen, Adam Curtis, Chuck Palahniuk, Desiree Akhavan, Ira Sachs, Ben Stiller and more. » - David Hudson...
- 3/11/2015
- Fandor: Keyframe
In his latest delightful entry, the Austrian Film Museum's Christoph Huber considers a couple of unconventional editing techniques born of necessity. Under consideration here are Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960) and, by way of Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties (1939), Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men (1949). Also in today's roundup of news and views: Books on Zhang Yimou and Alfred Hitchcock, Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis at 70, interviews with Jacques Doillon, Peter Strickland, Veronika Lisková, Jan Soldat, Stine Marie Jacobsen, Adam Curtis, Chuck Palahniuk, Desiree Akhavan, Ira Sachs, Ben Stiller and more. » - David Hudson...
- 3/11/2015
- Keyframe
Marc Allégret: From André Gide lover to Simone Simon mentor (photo: Marc Allégret) (See previous post: "Simone Simon Remembered: Sex Kitten and Femme Fatale.") Simone Simon became a film star following the international critical and financial success of the 1934 romantic drama Lac aux Dames, directed by her self-appointed mentor – and alleged lover – Marc Allégret.[1] The son of an evangelical missionary, Marc Allégret (born on December 22, 1900, in Basel, Switzerland) was to have become a lawyer. At age 16, his life took a different path as a result of his romantic involvement – and elopement to London – with his mentor and later "adoptive uncle" André Gide (1947 Nobel Prize winner in Literature), more than 30 years his senior and married to Madeleine Rondeaux for more than two decades. In various forms – including a threesome with painter Théo Van Rysselberghe's daughter Elisabeth – the Allégret-Gide relationship remained steady until the late '20s and their trip to...
- 2/28/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
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
Sean Penn: Honorary César goes Hollywood – again (photo: Sean Penn in '21 Grams') Sean Penn, 54, will receive the 2015 Honorary César (César d'Honneur), the French Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Crafts has announced. That means the French Academy's powers-that-be are once again trying to make the Prix César ceremony relevant to the American media. Their tactic is to hand out the career award to a widely known and relatively young – i.e., media friendly – Hollywood celebrity. (Scroll down for more such examples.) In the words of the French Academy, Honorary César 2015 recipient Sean Penn is a "living legend" and "a stand-alone icon in American cinema." It has also hailed the two-time Best Actor Oscar winner as a "mythical actor, a politically active personality and an exceptional director." Penn will be honored at the César Awards ceremony on Feb. 20, 2015. Sean Penn movies Sean Penn movies range from the teen comedy...
- 1/28/2015
- by Steve Montgomery
- Alt Film Guide
Translators introduction: This article by Mireille Latil Le Dantec, the first of two parts, was originally published in issue 40 of Cinématographe, September 1978. The previous issue of the magazine had included a dossier on "La qualité française" and a book of a never-shot script by Jean Grémillon (Le Printemps de la Liberté or The Spring of Freedom) had recently been published. The time was ripe for a re-evaluation of Grémillon's films and a resuscitation of his undervalued career. As this re-evaluation appears to still be happening nearly 40 years later—Grémillon's films have only recently seen DVD releases and a 35mm retrospective begins this week at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens—this article and its follow-up gives us an important view of a French perspective on Grémillon's work by a very perceptive critic doing the initial heavy-lifting in bringing the proper attention to the filmmaker's work.
Filmmaker maudit?...
Filmmaker maudit?...
- 11/30/2014
- by Ted Fendt
- MUBI
In 1946, the French animator Paul Grimault and poet/screenwriter Jacques Prévert set out to make what they hoped would be the first French animated feature film, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Shepherdess and the Chimneysweep.” Prévert was already a legend, having written Le jour se lève and Children of Paradise for director Marcel Carné. Meanwhile, Grimault’s wonderfully iconoclastic fables had won favor both during and after the war. You wouldn’t think two such heavy-duty names would meet much resistance, but within a couple of years, Grimault and Prévert had lost control of the project, and an incomplete, 63-minute version was released without their approval in 1953. That also made its way to U.S. shores in a dubbed version as The Curious Case of Mr. Wonderbird.A couple of decades later, the duo set out to complete the film. Prévert worked on the new script until...
- 11/21/2014
- by Bilge Ebiri
- Vulture
Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert's Le jour se lève (1939) "tracks the inevitable unraveling of factory worker François (Jean Gabin) after he kills the absurd vaudeville entertainer Valentin (Jules Berry), his romantic rival for the affections of Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent) and Clara (Arletty)," writes Anna King for Time Out. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw finds it "bristling with energy and shaped with incomparable artistry and flair." We're collecting reviews and the trailer for the new restoration opening at New York's Film Forum. » - David Hudson...
- 11/13/2014
- Keyframe
Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert's Le jour se lève (1939) "tracks the inevitable unraveling of factory worker François (Jean Gabin) after he kills the absurd vaudeville entertainer Valentin (Jules Berry), his romantic rival for the affections of Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent) and Clara (Arletty)," writes Anna King for Time Out. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw finds it "bristling with energy and shaped with incomparable artistry and flair." We're collecting reviews and the trailer for the new restoration opening at New York's Film Forum. » - David Hudson...
- 11/13/2014
- Fandor: Keyframe
It's one thing to watch sturdy, dexterously charming Jean Gabin as a working-class joe who doesn't mind dangerous manual labor, figuring that's his lot in life. But to see him as a man undone by his love for a noncommittal woman? That's nearly unbearable, and it's the linchpin of Marcel Carné's extraordinary, long-unseen 1939 crime drama Le Jour Se Lève (Daybreak), playing at Film Forum in a glistening restoration that includes footage removed by Vichy censors 75 years ago. Gabin plays François, who works all day with hardcore sandblasting equipment. Sand particles drift into his lungs, causing a wretched cough, but he doesn't complain: He's too much in love with Françoise (the comely Jacqueline Laurent), who lifts his spirits with litt...
- 11/12/2014
- Village Voice
Serious film fans will appreciate the 4K restoration of this 1939 French melodrama, which has been all but unseen for 75 years. I’m “biast” (pro): nothing
I’m “biast” (con): nothing
(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)
I don’t think I’d ever seen a French film from the 1930s before this one, and to say that I was shocked would be an understatement. While the Hays Code was newly censoring American films at that time, here we have nudity; implied extramarital sex (including one scene in which the couple lies together in bed talking; they’re fully clothed, but this is still nothing like what a Hollywood movie at the time could have gotten away with); and frank — not explicit but not at all coded or merely suggestive — talk about sex and, even more notably, about women’s desires.
The nudity was cut, as were some other bits,...
I’m “biast” (con): nothing
(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)
I don’t think I’d ever seen a French film from the 1930s before this one, and to say that I was shocked would be an understatement. While the Hays Code was newly censoring American films at that time, here we have nudity; implied extramarital sex (including one scene in which the couple lies together in bed talking; they’re fully clothed, but this is still nothing like what a Hollywood movie at the time could have gotten away with); and frank — not explicit but not at all coded or merely suggestive — talk about sex and, even more notably, about women’s desires.
The nudity was cut, as were some other bits,...
- 10/27/2014
- by MaryAnn Johanson
- www.flickfilosopher.com
★★★★★There's bleak and then there's Le Jour Se Lève (1939). To celebrate the film's 75th anniversary, this week sees the release of an immaculate 4K restoration along with what the Independent Cinema Office are calling "new previously censored scenes that will be seen by audiences for the very first time." Easily director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert's most accomplished film together, Le Jour Se Lève is packed to the gills with actors who embodied both cinema and Frenchness that would hold until the iconography changed when the Nouvelle Vague stormed the barricades in the late fifties. This bastion of poetic realism stands as an entry point for French cinema that spread across to Britain and beyond.
- 10/2/2014
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
Al Pacino has received a BFI Fellowship tonight (September 24).
The Godfather actor was given the prestigious award in honour of his achievement in film by BFI chair Greg Dyke and CEO Amanda Nevill.
"This is such a great honour... the BFI is a wonderful thing, how it keeps films alive," Pacino told the gathered crowd at the Corinthia Hotel in London.
"It's an honour to be here and receive this. I'm overwhelmed – people I've adored have received this award. I appreciate this so much, thank you."
BFI Fellowship winner John Hurt, Terry Gilliam, Richard E Grant, Joan Collins, Ian Holm and Steven Berkoff were among the stars in attendance for the gala dinner.
Pacino has earned many prestigious awards over the course of his career, including a Best Actor Oscar and two BAFTAs.
Previous recipients of the BFI Fellowship include Christopher Lee, Tim Burton, Judi Dench and Ridley Scott.
The...
The Godfather actor was given the prestigious award in honour of his achievement in film by BFI chair Greg Dyke and CEO Amanda Nevill.
"This is such a great honour... the BFI is a wonderful thing, how it keeps films alive," Pacino told the gathered crowd at the Corinthia Hotel in London.
"It's an honour to be here and receive this. I'm overwhelmed – people I've adored have received this award. I appreciate this so much, thank you."
BFI Fellowship winner John Hurt, Terry Gilliam, Richard E Grant, Joan Collins, Ian Holm and Steven Berkoff were among the stars in attendance for the gala dinner.
Pacino has earned many prestigious awards over the course of his career, including a Best Actor Oscar and two BAFTAs.
Previous recipients of the BFI Fellowship include Christopher Lee, Tim Burton, Judi Dench and Ridley Scott.
The...
- 9/24/2014
- Digital Spy
From October 8 to 19, the 43rd edition of the Festival du nouveau cinéma will run. This year’s lineup of 380 films (152 features and 228 shorts from 55 countries) includes 40 world premieres, 51 North American premieres and 41 Canadian premieres. The festival opens with the English language debut of Philippe Falardeau, The Good Lie and closes with the feature documentary The Salt of the Earth co-directed by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado.
Always balancing the best of local and world cinema, this year’s line-up features favourites of the festival circuit including a number of key world premieres. Some key releases include, Félix and Meira (winner of best Canadian feature at Tiff), Adieu au langage (Jean- Luc Godard), Horse Money (Pedro Costa), Hard to Be a God (Aleksey German), Jauja (Lisandro Alonso), Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg), P’tit Quinquin (Bruno Dumont), Wild (Jean-Marc Vallee), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour...
Always balancing the best of local and world cinema, this year’s line-up features favourites of the festival circuit including a number of key world premieres. Some key releases include, Félix and Meira (winner of best Canadian feature at Tiff), Adieu au langage (Jean- Luc Godard), Horse Money (Pedro Costa), Hard to Be a God (Aleksey German), Jauja (Lisandro Alonso), Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg), P’tit Quinquin (Bruno Dumont), Wild (Jean-Marc Vallee), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour...
- 9/23/2014
- by Justine Smith
- SoundOnSight
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
Above: 1960 re-release poster for Second Chance (Jean Delannoy, France, 1947).
A couple of weeks ago the invaluable New York movie poster store Posteritati unveiled their newest acquisitions: nearly 500 new posters including many superb, rare Czech designs and some stunning one-offs like this poster for a short film about Brian Eno. But one of the highlights for me was a small collection of posters by the German designer Isolde Monson-Baumgart, some of which I had never seen before.
I featured Baumgart’s sublime poster for The Earrings of Madame De... last year and have been looking for more work by her ever since. Baumgart, who passed away in 2011 at the age of 76, was one of the chief designers—under the late great Hans Hillmann—employed by the Neue Filmkunst, the arthouse distribution company founded by Walter Kirchner in 1953. Like many of her fellow designers who together revolutionized German film advertising in the 1960s,...
A couple of weeks ago the invaluable New York movie poster store Posteritati unveiled their newest acquisitions: nearly 500 new posters including many superb, rare Czech designs and some stunning one-offs like this poster for a short film about Brian Eno. But one of the highlights for me was a small collection of posters by the German designer Isolde Monson-Baumgart, some of which I had never seen before.
I featured Baumgart’s sublime poster for The Earrings of Madame De... last year and have been looking for more work by her ever since. Baumgart, who passed away in 2011 at the age of 76, was one of the chief designers—under the late great Hans Hillmann—employed by the Neue Filmkunst, the arthouse distribution company founded by Walter Kirchner in 1953. Like many of her fellow designers who together revolutionized German film advertising in the 1960s,...
- 6/6/2014
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
The umpteenth screen version of Thérèse Raquin is lifted by occasional humour and Lange's impressive performance
This latest adaptation (via Neal Bell's stage play) of Émile Zola's 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin is notable largely for the anguished, nuanced performance of Jessica Lange as tortured and torturing mother Madame Raquin, an impressively physical account of seething rage and maddening horror. Elizabeth Olsen is the initially repressed eponymous anti-heroine whose passions are awakened by Oscar Isaac's brooding rake, with deadly results. The story (first filmed in 1915 and reinterpreted endlessly since) is well rehearsed: illicit desires provoke a mortal sin in the shadow of which fleshy pleasures wither. Charlie Stratton, who directed Bell's play on stage in La, paints 19th-century Paris as a torpid dung-hole in which the suffocating air of death (Matt Lucas's bewigged Olivier literally stinks of the morgue) is alleviated only by the spark of lust a...
This latest adaptation (via Neal Bell's stage play) of Émile Zola's 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin is notable largely for the anguished, nuanced performance of Jessica Lange as tortured and torturing mother Madame Raquin, an impressively physical account of seething rage and maddening horror. Elizabeth Olsen is the initially repressed eponymous anti-heroine whose passions are awakened by Oscar Isaac's brooding rake, with deadly results. The story (first filmed in 1915 and reinterpreted endlessly since) is well rehearsed: illicit desires provoke a mortal sin in the shadow of which fleshy pleasures wither. Charlie Stratton, who directed Bell's play on stage in La, paints 19th-century Paris as a torpid dung-hole in which the suffocating air of death (Matt Lucas's bewigged Olivier literally stinks of the morgue) is alleviated only by the spark of lust a...
- 5/17/2014
- by Mark Kermode, Observer film critic
- The Guardian - Film News
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
Sophia Loren and her son Edoardo Ponti heading for Cannes One of the grand surviving divas of Italian Cinema Sophia Loren will be the guest of honour in the Cannes Classics section of the official selection, it was announced today (April 30), with a programme of restored works including films by Jean Renoir, François Truffaut, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Marcel Carné, Sergio Leone and Frank Capra.
The selection comprises 22 features and two documentaries about cinema, all screening for the first time exclusively in digiital copies with no 35mm prints on view.
Loren will be present at the screening of The Human Voice (La Voce Umana), directed by her son Edoardo Ponti, which marks her return to the screen after a gap of several years. The short film is based on a one-person play first performed in 1930, and written by the French poet and writer Jean Cocteau. Unlike the stage version, which was written in French,...
The selection comprises 22 features and two documentaries about cinema, all screening for the first time exclusively in digiital copies with no 35mm prints on view.
Loren will be present at the screening of The Human Voice (La Voce Umana), directed by her son Edoardo Ponti, which marks her return to the screen after a gap of several years. The short film is based on a one-person play first performed in 1930, and written by the French poet and writer Jean Cocteau. Unlike the stage version, which was written in French,...
- 4/30/2014
- by Richard Mowe
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
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