Pornocaust
A Pathe-Natan projector.
Ah, how’s that for an offensive title? Sexy Week draws towards a close with a tragic and bizarre tale from the memory banks. It’s always this way — it begins with flirting, hanky-panky and pin-up pictures. It ends in GENOCIDE.
An ex-student of mine told me that he was Googling gay porn, as students have done since at least the sixteenth century, when he came upon, if you’ll pardon the expression, something rather interesting.
Bernard Natan was a Romanian Jew who kick-started the Romanian gay porn cinema in the 20s (ah yes, that famous Romanian gay porn cinema we’ve all heard so much about) before heading for Paris where he scaled up his productions considerably. Natan produced, directed and starred in big-budget, lavishly designed gay hardcore (opulent furnishings being considered more important in same-sex erotica than in the straight stuff, where basically all you need is a stained mattress and some walls). Natan was also responsible for introducing sado-masochistic practices into French porno films, which should presumably qualify him for some kind of posthumous Cesar award.
Then, astonishingly, he went legit, and became the head of the prestigious Pathé company. The company was not as major a player as it had been, having licensed off it’s famous name and various other assets, but Natan was able to produce some prestigious and successful films, from directors like René Clair and Claude Autant-Lara.
During this time, Natan was putting up with considerable opprobrium from the French popular press, who alluded to his Jewishness and homosexuality at every opportunity (embarrassing, perhaps, since Natan was also married). But worse was to come.
In 193 Pathé went bankrupt and Natan was charged with fraud. He was eventually given a short prison sentence. Just as his stretch inside was ending, the Nazis took France. The prison authorities released Natan — directly into the hands of the Nazis, who shipped him to Auschwitz, where he perished.
Astonishingly, there’s MORE. After the war, Natan’s trial record was looked at more closely, and investigators concluded that there had been no real evidence against him in the first place. The man was innocent, of fraud anyway, or at any rate he should not have been convicted.
It seems to me that this story has EVERYTHING, and should immediately be turned into a gobsmacking documentary, illustrated with copious clips from whatever fragments of Natan’s oeuvre survive. Would suit somebody from the porn field looking to crack the mainstream. If there’s anybody in that field of ambition and initiative comparable to Natan’s.
Another , different Romanian.
See comments below: Paul Duane uncovers the REAL true story about Natan… and Nathan.
October 18, 2008 at 12:25 am
Thanks for bringing this very sad story to light. I hope you’ve seen Paragraph 175. If not rush out and get the DVD immediately. “Eye-opener” doesn’t begin to describe this documentary about the treatment of gays by the Nazis.
October 18, 2008 at 11:15 am
That sounds impressive. The IMDb, in one of it’s more unfortunate bits of formatting, lists the following under FUN STUFF: Trivia:
“An unnatural sex act committed between persons of the male sex or by humans with animals is punishable by imprisonment; the loss of civil rights may also be imposed.” (Paragraph 175, German Penal Code, 1871)
I seem to remember hearing that after the war the French didn’t bother compensating homosexual holocaust survivors, as they did the Jews and gypsies. Can this be true?
October 18, 2008 at 1:28 pm
True. The film deals with this.
October 18, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Just incredible. It amounts to post-war powers basically sanctioning aspects of the holocaust. No compensation = no crime in killing or torturing those people.
October 18, 2008 at 2:02 pm
So bestiality was lumped in with sex acts committed between members of the male sex. Why did the Nazis choose to overlook sex acts between persons of the female sex?
October 18, 2008 at 2:10 pm
There’s that rumour about lesbianism being legal in Victorian England because Queen Victoria refused to believe it existed. Apparently untrue, but I think there may have been a similar attitude, more widespread in the legislature around the world.
October 18, 2008 at 4:33 pm
They regard lesbains as women who “haven’t found themselves a REAL MAN.”
Marlene Dietrich was her own REAL MAN.
October 18, 2008 at 5:18 pm
And what a man!
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=jO0h190oboE&NR=1
October 19, 2008 at 1:52 am
Amazing story that could also make a great narrative film, provided someone was courageous enough to make it.
October 26, 2008 at 7:53 pm
This post intrigued me enough that I found myself in the wilder realms of Google, and intriguingly enough, it seems that there were two Bernards – one, the pornographer, was Nathan, the other, an early proponent of Cinemascope and also of television, and the saviour of Pathe, was Natan. It seems like his enemies siezed on the similarity of the names in order to blacken his character (not that, being a Romanian Jew in 1935, he needed much blackening) and to help send him to jail as a scapegoat… The book “Black and White and Blue” by Dave Thompson gives chapter and verse on Nathan, and this website – http://www.lips.org/bio_natan_GB_reponse_%C3%A0_slade.asp – on the other. If anything, this makes the story even more interesting – sort of a porn-inflected version of Mr Klein!
October 27, 2008 at 12:52 am
Fascinating! Wikipedia — incorrect? I am flabbergasted. Still, it’s even better for a movie version.
February 21, 2009 at 10:01 am
[...] was framed for fraud, imprisoned by the French, and then murdered by the Nazis. I blogged about him here, repeating the canard that he was a pornographer and gay porn star, until it was pointed out by [...]
February 1, 2011 at 11:15 am
This article is very misleading as it iuses the words gay and homosexual to imply that Bernard Natan made homosexual pornography. He did not. He made bisexual pornography. The first “gay” porn movie was actually a “Bi” porn movie.
So while you have mentioned that Natan was married what you have written is a very good example of what is now called “bisexual erasure”.
February 1, 2011 at 6:38 pm
But it’s even more inaccurate than that, since I was misled by the Wikipedia entry to believe that Natan was one man, not two. I have no information as to whether Bernard Nathan, who made porn films, was married. Bernard Natan, who produced “legitimate” films and was killed by the Nazis, was married, but there’s no reason to believe he was gay or bi.
Interested in more into on either man, Nathan especially.
November 18, 2011 at 2:59 am
Stumbled upon this post through Google. Bernard Nathan (the pornographer) was not Romanian or Jewish, he was most likely French but we can’t say for sure.
I should also mention that the thought of “Bernard Natan” making pornos is Romania is complete rubbish. After WWI, you needed a rich businessman to fund your film and no businessman would have given money to a stag film. Furthermore, films were less profitable in Romania after WWI and since Romania didn’t have the brothel culture of France, there were no places to show stag films. If “Bernard Natan” was making pornos in Romania after WWI, he would have always been in the red. If he was caught making pornography, he would not have been spared even if he was a war hero. Why? Romania was really, really anti-Semitic. If they found a Jew distributing pornography, he would have been killed and it would have caused a pogrom.
Back to the real Bernard Nathan. Most of his films were heterosexual and they were shown in brothels. Despite the whining of geri, his other films were homosexual, not bisexual. Check your privilege. Nathan had an Arab themed film where a man convinced some veiled women to strip and then the sheik’s bodyguards barge in and have sex with the man. Madame Butterfly is better described as a gay tease than a truly bisexual film. All of the men in that film (three of them) engage in homosexual acts and Bernard Nathan is the power bottom. Bernard Nathan clearly has masculine features and obviously an adult so the men having sex with him cannot use the excuse that he was a substitute for a woman. If he was younger and more feminine looking, then it may have been passable (see Surprise of a Knight). I should also note that there are more men in that film than women which is odd for bisexual films. It should be even or have more women (better scene possibilities). The narrative of the film is a convenient excuse to show it in a mostly straight brothel and it falls apart anyways when the two male rivals end up having sex with the servant boy (Bernard Nathan). The final sex scene is very subversive. It shows gay anal sex as being just as sexually satisfying even when vaginal sex is readily available. Madame Butterfly is an introduction of gay sex to straight (and curious) men. That’s how it should be taken.