NATAN

NATAN, rough poster test by Enda O’Connor.

NATAN, the documentary by Paul Duane and myself, screens this evening at 18:10 at the Irish Film Institute. Fiona and I are flying over in the morning. Paul and I will be wafted before the public’s adoring eye at the screening. We may also be appearing on a panel later in the weekend, entitled How To Get Your Documentary Made or something like that. Hilarious, since I know nothing whatsoever about the subject — Paul deserves all the credit for getting NATAN made. But I might be able to describe some of the things he did that resulted in the film getting made.

Bernard Natan used to sign his films — literally, his producer credit was an animated signature inscribing itself on the screen. And then, as Natan’s reputation was destroyed and his company taken away from him, a lot of his films were shorn of their signatures. When the movies got re-released, it was considered embarrassing for their executive producer’s name to be seen. And during the Occupation, many Jewish filmmakers were quietly erased from title sequences.

Since then, Natan’s name has been restored to some of his films, and a few historians have attempted to restore his reputation. That’s the effort Paul and I hope to contribute to with our film, which should tell a dramatic and tragic story, shine a light upon some neglected corners of cinema history — but also help give Bernard Natan his good name back ~

NATAN on the IMDb. Bernard Natan on the IMDb, still listing one of the pornographic films he never made. And our first review — a rave!

Mogul

Prototype poster image by Enda O’Connor.

NATAN, directed by Paul Duane and myself, premiers in its English-language version at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival on February 15th. Fiona and I will be there. If you come, I will shake you by the hand and call you friend.

Link.

Terrifying truth — the film is still being finished. Final grade and dub are underway as I type. I’m astonished at what we were able to uncover and get into the film and what we had to leave out. I *think* we’ve taken a dizzyingly complicated story and boiled it down to a comprehensible form without distorting the essence of what happened, and I *think* we’ve finally given Bernard Natan something of his due as a true forefather of modern French cinema, without whom the filmmaking landscape throughout the world might look very different. And I know we’ve evoked something of the injustice of Natan’s being virtually erased from film history — when our voice-over artist got choked up about it right there in the booth (“Is that true? Oh my God!”) — that was a pretty encouraging moment.

Radio Edit

An anti-semitic vision of Radio London from the WWII Vichy animated propaganda film NIMBUS LIBERE.

Eoin our editor turned in what he calls a “radio edit” of the NATAN film — interviews spliced together to tell the story in big chunks of talk, with nothing to look at (apart from yapping faces). It was over three hours long. But the good news is that it told the story, apart from a few bits we need to create with VO and archive footage and other techniques. I fly back to Edinburgh for the weekend and return Tuesday morning, at which point we’ll be looking at Eoin’s reduction of the footage to around 100 minutes — he’s FAST, this guy. And he’s already incorporating some of the visuals — newsreels, movie clips, tests, and our own material. The final film will be a kind of collage, where we’ll rarely be looking at any one interviewee for long.

The really interesting material I don’t want to talk about yet.

One of our great discoveries was Jean Dreville’s AUTOUR DE L’ARGENT, a making-of film depicting the creation of Marcel L’Herbier’s L’ARGENT, filmed in Natan’s Joinville studio. It’s not a Natan production, but it shows his huge cinema empire in operation during his heyday, just before he purchased Pathe, and affords glimpses of several collaborators, including L’Herbier himself who would make three films for Pathe-Natan.

My co-director Paul Duane struck a deal with L’Herbier’s grand-daughter to use a chunk of this footage, and since the actual Pathe-Natan films are so expensive (despite fairly generous discounts), it’s a real life-saver.