Lee Grant, the Oscar-winning actress (“Shampoo”) says she decided after her win to try to direct since good roles for older women were limited. It turns out that was about the halfway point of her 98 year (so far) life. What followed was a narrative feature (“Tell Me a Riddle”) and several documentaries, including “Down and Out in America,” which won an Oscar.
When we last ran our list of the oldest living feature film directors in late 2022, where Grant stood was a mystery. Since her breakout in William Wyler’s “The Detective Story” (1951), her first nomination, her year of birth was unclear. But recently she has clarified that that she was born in 1925. That makes her, to the best of our knowledge, older than any of her peers.
Below are listed the 25 oldest. Since our most recent list, Norman Lear, Robert M. Young (both of who briefly were the oldest...
When we last ran our list of the oldest living feature film directors in late 2022, where Grant stood was a mystery. Since her breakout in William Wyler’s “The Detective Story” (1951), her first nomination, her year of birth was unclear. But recently she has clarified that that she was born in 1925. That makes her, to the best of our knowledge, older than any of her peers.
Below are listed the 25 oldest. Since our most recent list, Norman Lear, Robert M. Young (both of who briefly were the oldest...
- 2/16/2024
- by Tom Brueggemann
- Indiewire
The holidays are upon us, so whether you looking for film-related gifts or simply want to pick up some of the finest the year had to offer in the category for yourself, we have a gift guide for you. Including must-have books on filmmaking, the best from the Criterion Collection and more home-video picks, subscriptions, magazines, music, and more, dive in below.
Giveaways
In celebration of our holiday gift guide, we’ll be doing a number of giveaways! First up, we’re giving away My First Movie Vol. 2, a three-part ‘lil cinephile series by Cory Everett and illustrator Julie Olivi, featuring My First Spaghetti Western, My First Yakuza Movie, and My First Hollywood Musical.
Enter on Instagram (for My First Yakuza Movie), Twitter (for My First Hollywood Musical), and/or Facebook (for My First Spaghetti Western) by Sunday, November 26 at 11:59pm Et. Those that enter on all three platforms...
Giveaways
In celebration of our holiday gift guide, we’ll be doing a number of giveaways! First up, we’re giving away My First Movie Vol. 2, a three-part ‘lil cinephile series by Cory Everett and illustrator Julie Olivi, featuring My First Spaghetti Western, My First Yakuza Movie, and My First Hollywood Musical.
Enter on Instagram (for My First Yakuza Movie), Twitter (for My First Hollywood Musical), and/or Facebook (for My First Spaghetti Western) by Sunday, November 26 at 11:59pm Et. Those that enter on all three platforms...
- 11/20/2023
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity is a veritable chorus of disparate voices and striking faces, exquisitely juxtaposed in a way that challenges the once widely accepted notion of a strong, resistant France in the face of evil. This prismatic examination of the citizens of the small central French city of Clermont-Ferrand and their German occupiers features testimonies of integrity and betrayal, courage and indifference, capturing the full spectrum of the human condition within a fascinating microcosm of opposing forces.
Interviews with everyone from British secret agents and French resistance fighters to neutral citizens and Nazi officers provide an exhaustive, often contradictory, and always enlightening account of the years of the Nazi occupation of France and its aftermath that speaks to the factions and perspectives at play both during and after the war. Ophüls, though, is less interested in providing an overview of this historical period than he...
Interviews with everyone from British secret agents and French resistance fighters to neutral citizens and Nazi officers provide an exhaustive, often contradictory, and always enlightening account of the years of the Nazi occupation of France and its aftermath that speaks to the factions and perspectives at play both during and after the war. Ophüls, though, is less interested in providing an overview of this historical period than he...
- 6/1/2023
- by Derek Smith
- Slant Magazine
NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.
Film at Lincoln Center
Claire Denis’ masterful first feature Chocolat has been restored in 4K and begins a run.
Anthology Film Archives
“Working Girl(s)” highlights the working woman, spanning Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames to Mike Nichols’ Working Girl, while a series curated by Borden gets underway.
Paris Theater
After Hours screens on Sunday with a Griffin Dunne Q&a to follow.
Film Forum
The Sorrow and the Pity begins a run; Lou Ye’s Suzhou River continues showing in a 4K restoration while Song of the Sea plays this Sunday.
Roxy Cinema
The Todd Solondz retro continues with 35mm showings of Palindromes and Life During Wartime, while Wiener-Dog also shows; a puppet program plays on 16mm this Sunday.
Museum of the Moving Image
Miyazaki’s Ponyo plays Saturday and Sunday; Argento’s Deep Red plays Saturday.
IFC Center
House,...
Film at Lincoln Center
Claire Denis’ masterful first feature Chocolat has been restored in 4K and begins a run.
Anthology Film Archives
“Working Girl(s)” highlights the working woman, spanning Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames to Mike Nichols’ Working Girl, while a series curated by Borden gets underway.
Paris Theater
After Hours screens on Sunday with a Griffin Dunne Q&a to follow.
Film Forum
The Sorrow and the Pity begins a run; Lou Ye’s Suzhou River continues showing in a 4K restoration while Song of the Sea plays this Sunday.
Roxy Cinema
The Todd Solondz retro continues with 35mm showings of Palindromes and Life During Wartime, while Wiener-Dog also shows; a puppet program plays on 16mm this Sunday.
Museum of the Moving Image
Miyazaki’s Ponyo plays Saturday and Sunday; Argento’s Deep Red plays Saturday.
IFC Center
House,...
- 2/23/2023
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
As an artist Henri-Georges Clouzot was fearless: in the darkness of the German occupation he made a movie about the social crime of informing. Poison Pen accusations destroy trust, bringing out the worst in the people of a small French town. Who is The Crow and how many will suffer before the letters stop? It’s a study in vitriolic misanthropy — the kind of cold observation that Clouzot does so well. At the war’s finish director Clouzot was accused of collaboration, and for a time was censured. Later on, some English critics classified the show as a horror film. It’s certainly creepy enough.
Le Corbeau
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 227
1943 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 91 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date , 2022 / 39.95
Starring: Pierre Fresnay, Ginette Leclerc, Micheline Francey, Héléna Manson, Jeanne Fusier-Gir, Sylvie, Liliane Maigné, Pierre Larquey, Noël Roquevert, Bernard Lancret, Antoine Balpêtré, Jean Brochard, Pierre Bertin, Louis Seigner,...
Le Corbeau
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 227
1943 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 91 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date , 2022 / 39.95
Starring: Pierre Fresnay, Ginette Leclerc, Micheline Francey, Héléna Manson, Jeanne Fusier-Gir, Sylvie, Liliane Maigné, Pierre Larquey, Noël Roquevert, Bernard Lancret, Antoine Balpêtré, Jean Brochard, Pierre Bertin, Louis Seigner,...
- 9/13/2022
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Above: Poster by Frank Stella for the 9th New York Film Festival.Compared to the 32 films in the main slate of this year’s New York Film Festival, not to mention the seemingly hundreds of others playing in sidebars, the 1971 edition of the NYFF, half a century ago, was a lean affair. With only 18 films, down from 78 just four years earlier, the ninth edition of the NYFF was, according to its director Richard Roud, a “belt-tightening festival, a year of consolidation.” In fact, the financially strapped festival almost didn’t take place that year. A New York Times article published midway through the event mentions that “outside the 984-seat Vivian Beaumont Theater, there is only one poster announcing the festival [one assumes it was the beautiful Frank Stella poster above] that is quietly and modestly taking place inside.” A far cry from the glorious phalanx of digital billboards currently beaming outside Alice Tully Hall and the Elinor Bunin Center.The...
- 10/6/2021
- MUBI
The summer is coming to an end and with it comes a number of films to have on your to-watch list. From some highly-anticipated auteur-driven films to dazzling animations to riveting documentaries to horror stand-outs, there’s a wide-ranging array of selections. Check out our picks to see below.
12. Ma Belle, My Beauty (Marion Hill)
A premiere at Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Marion Hill’s acclaimed drama Ma Belle, My Beauty explores the nuances of a polyamorous relationship. John Fink said in his review, “In some relationships it’s easier to pick up where you left off, even after years of being apart. Others, such as those at the core of Marion Hill’s impressive, nuanced feature film debut Ma Belle, My Beauty—contain more heartbreak and baggage. Screening in Sundance’s Next category, Hill’s picture navigates uncomfortable truths with perspective and lyrical emotional honestly as Lane...
12. Ma Belle, My Beauty (Marion Hill)
A premiere at Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Marion Hill’s acclaimed drama Ma Belle, My Beauty explores the nuances of a polyamorous relationship. John Fink said in his review, “In some relationships it’s easier to pick up where you left off, even after years of being apart. Others, such as those at the core of Marion Hill’s impressive, nuanced feature film debut Ma Belle, My Beauty—contain more heartbreak and baggage. Screening in Sundance’s Next category, Hill’s picture navigates uncomfortable truths with perspective and lyrical emotional honestly as Lane...
- 8/3/2021
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Claude Chabrol’s ‘minor’ wartime drama is one of the best movies of its kind I’ve seen. A French town under German rule lies on a river straddling occupied and Vichy territories, and becomes a hotbed of intrigues. Yes, there’s resistance activity, but we also see that most people avoid involvement — and some find ways to profit from the desperation of refugees fleeing the Nazis. It’s a case of small town, everyday terror. The stellar cast is subordinated to the powerful, non-exploitative drama: Jean Seberg, Maurice Ronet, Daniel Gélin, Jacques Perrin & Stéphane Audran. Samm Deighan’s informative commentary is a big +Plus.
Line of Demarcation
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1966 / B&w / 1:66 widescreen / 121 min. / Street Date February 25, 2020 / La ligne de démarcation / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Jean Seberg, Maurice Ronet, Daniel Gélin, Jacques Perrin, Stéphane Audran, Reinhard Kolldehoff, Claude Léveillée, Roger Dumas, Jean Yanne, Jean-Louis Maury, Pierre Gualdi,...
Line of Demarcation
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1966 / B&w / 1:66 widescreen / 121 min. / Street Date February 25, 2020 / La ligne de démarcation / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Jean Seberg, Maurice Ronet, Daniel Gélin, Jacques Perrin, Stéphane Audran, Reinhard Kolldehoff, Claude Léveillée, Roger Dumas, Jean Yanne, Jean-Louis Maury, Pierre Gualdi,...
- 7/31/2021
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Milestone’s library of more than 150 titles includes Portrait Of Jason, Say Amen, Somebody.
Kino Lorber has signed a multi-year strategic distribution and acquisition agreement with Milestone Films, the New York-based company renowned for restoring and distributing classics such as Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba.
Under the pact Kino Lorber gets exclusive US and international distribution rights to Milestone’s library of more than 150 titles and all its future restorations and acquisitions under the Milestone Films In Association With Kino Lorber label.
Husband-and-wife partners Dennis Doros and Amy Heller founded Milestone in 1990 and have over the past three decades...
Kino Lorber has signed a multi-year strategic distribution and acquisition agreement with Milestone Films, the New York-based company renowned for restoring and distributing classics such as Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba.
Under the pact Kino Lorber gets exclusive US and international distribution rights to Milestone’s library of more than 150 titles and all its future restorations and acquisitions under the Milestone Films In Association With Kino Lorber label.
Husband-and-wife partners Dennis Doros and Amy Heller founded Milestone in 1990 and have over the past three decades...
- 6/2/2021
- by Jeremy Kay
- ScreenDaily
Helping you stay sane while staying safe… featuring Leonard Maltin, Dave Anthony, Miguel Arteta, John Landis, and Blaire Bercy from the Hollywood Food Coalition.
Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode
Plague (1979)
Target Earth (1954)
The Left Hand of God (1955)
A Lost Lady (1934)
Enough Said (2013)
Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)
Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939)
Heaven Can Wait (1978)
Down to Earth (2001)
Down To Earth (1947)
The Commitments (1991)
Once (2007)
Election (1999)
About Schmidt (2002)
Sideways (2004)
Nebraska (2013)
The Man in the Moon (1991)
The 39 Steps (1935)
Casablanca (1942)
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
The Night Walker (1964)
Chuck and Buck (2000)
Cedar Rapids (2011)
Beatriz at Dinner (2017)
Duck Butter (2018)
The Good Girl (2002)
The Big Heat (1953)
Human Desire (1954)
Slightly French (1949)
Week-End with Father (1951)
Experiment In Terror (1962)
They Shoot Horses Don’t They? (1969)
Ray’s Male Heterosexual Dance Hall (1987)
Airport (1970)
Earthquake (1974)
Drive a Crooked Road (1954)
Pushover (1954)
Waves (2019)
Krisha (2015)
The Oblong Box (1969)
80,000 Suspects (1963)
Panic In The Streets (1950)
It Comes At Night (2017)
Children of Men (2006)
The Road (2009)
You Were Never Really Here...
Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode
Plague (1979)
Target Earth (1954)
The Left Hand of God (1955)
A Lost Lady (1934)
Enough Said (2013)
Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)
Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939)
Heaven Can Wait (1978)
Down to Earth (2001)
Down To Earth (1947)
The Commitments (1991)
Once (2007)
Election (1999)
About Schmidt (2002)
Sideways (2004)
Nebraska (2013)
The Man in the Moon (1991)
The 39 Steps (1935)
Casablanca (1942)
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
The Night Walker (1964)
Chuck and Buck (2000)
Cedar Rapids (2011)
Beatriz at Dinner (2017)
Duck Butter (2018)
The Good Girl (2002)
The Big Heat (1953)
Human Desire (1954)
Slightly French (1949)
Week-End with Father (1951)
Experiment In Terror (1962)
They Shoot Horses Don’t They? (1969)
Ray’s Male Heterosexual Dance Hall (1987)
Airport (1970)
Earthquake (1974)
Drive a Crooked Road (1954)
Pushover (1954)
Waves (2019)
Krisha (2015)
The Oblong Box (1969)
80,000 Suspects (1963)
Panic In The Streets (1950)
It Comes At Night (2017)
Children of Men (2006)
The Road (2009)
You Were Never Really Here...
- 5/1/2020
- by Kris Millsap
- Trailers from Hell
Each month, the fine folks at FilmStruck and the Criterion Collection spend countless hours crafting their channels to highlight the many different types of films that they have in their streaming library. This December will feature an exciting assortment of films, as noted below.
To sign up for a free two-week trial here.
Friday, December 1
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World*: Criterion Collection Edition #692
Stanley Kramer followed his harrowing Oscar winner Judgment at Nuremberg with the most grandly harebrained movie ever made, a pileup of slapstick and borscht-belt-y one-liners about a group of strangers fighting tooth and nail over buried treasure. Performed by a nonpareil cast, including Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Spencer Tracy, Jonathan Winters, and a boatload of other playing-to-the-rafters comedy legends, Kramer’s wildly uncharacteristic film is an exhilarating epic of tomfoolery. Supplemental Features: an audio commentary featuring It’s a Mad,...
To sign up for a free two-week trial here.
Friday, December 1
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World*: Criterion Collection Edition #692
Stanley Kramer followed his harrowing Oscar winner Judgment at Nuremberg with the most grandly harebrained movie ever made, a pileup of slapstick and borscht-belt-y one-liners about a group of strangers fighting tooth and nail over buried treasure. Performed by a nonpareil cast, including Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Spencer Tracy, Jonathan Winters, and a boatload of other playing-to-the-rafters comedy legends, Kramer’s wildly uncharacteristic film is an exhilarating epic of tomfoolery. Supplemental Features: an audio commentary featuring It’s a Mad,...
- 11/30/2017
- by Ryan Gallagher
- CriterionCast
Conventional limitations on cinematic runtimes, often driven by basic practical and commercial concerns, are at once arbitrary and enduring. Under 90 minutes is short; over 150 minutes is long. Short films lie on one end of the spectrum and Andy Warhol on the other. But even limiting discussion to non-experimental feature films reveals a wide variation in the use of massive duration, discussions of which tend to be obscured by the hyperbole (in both directions) that such films often elicit. (This hyperbolic tendency also extends to trilogies, multi-part films, or even novels and literature in general. Just ask anyone who’s seen Sátántangó or read Infinite Jest.) Nonetheless, such films tend to be fascinating opportunities for exploration, both in their justification for and use of such length. And on the occasion of Mubi’s retrospective of Lav Diaz’s filmography (the body of work that most consistently makes use of duration), three vastly different 2016 films,...
- 11/29/2016
- MUBI
Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary feature takes his earlier The Act of Killing one step further. An Indonesian optometrist dares to interview death squad leaders that half a century before murdered a million people as part of an anti-communist genocide. The eye doctor's own brother was one of the victims. What we see sheds light on a long-suppressed outrage, smothered by a reign of terror and international indifference. The Look of Silence Blu-ray + Digital HD Drafthouse / Cinedigm Films 2014 / Color / 1:78 widescreen / 103 min. / Street Date January 12, 2016 / 29.93 Starring Adi Rukun Cinematography Lars Skree Film Editor Nils Pagh Andersen Original Music Seri Banang, Mana Tahan Produced by Sygne Byrge Sorensen Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
We in America truly live a sheltered First-World life, where a level of basic security is still considered the norm. But terrible events that occur beyond the reach of the news media, or that are simply inconvenient,...
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
We in America truly live a sheltered First-World life, where a level of basic security is still considered the norm. But terrible events that occur beyond the reach of the news media, or that are simply inconvenient,...
- 1/9/2016
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Exclusive: Ballet movie sells for Wide House, who are also beginning pre-sales on Unpleasant Truths directed by Marcel Opuls.
Wide House has concluded an eye-catching deal on its new ballet movie Ulyana Lopatkina.
The film, directed by Marlene Ionesco, follows the twists and turns, ups and downs, in the career of Ulyana Lopatkina, a prima ballerina at the Kirov Ballet/Mariinsky Theatre. It has been picked up for Japan by Showgate in an all rights deal.
At Berlin’s European Film Market (Efm), the company is also beginning pre-sales on what promises to be a highly controversial new doc from Marcel Opuls (the French director of The Sorrow And The Pity).
The new film, entitled Unpleasant Truths and made by Ophuls and Eyal Sivan, asks whether “Islamophobia is the new anti-Semitism” and also explores “the very strange linkage between the far right in Europe and Israel.”
Just prior to the Efm, Wide sold its...
Wide House has concluded an eye-catching deal on its new ballet movie Ulyana Lopatkina.
The film, directed by Marlene Ionesco, follows the twists and turns, ups and downs, in the career of Ulyana Lopatkina, a prima ballerina at the Kirov Ballet/Mariinsky Theatre. It has been picked up for Japan by Showgate in an all rights deal.
At Berlin’s European Film Market (Efm), the company is also beginning pre-sales on what promises to be a highly controversial new doc from Marcel Opuls (the French director of The Sorrow And The Pity).
The new film, entitled Unpleasant Truths and made by Ophuls and Eyal Sivan, asks whether “Islamophobia is the new anti-Semitism” and also explores “the very strange linkage between the far right in Europe and Israel.”
Just prior to the Efm, Wide sold its...
- 2/8/2015
- by geoffrey@macnab.demon.co.uk (Geoffrey Macnab)
- ScreenDaily
This is a reprint of an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education , L’affaire Natan, about a little known story given new life, the Dreyfus affair of French cinema. “Natan", a new documentary from Ireland by the filmmakers David Cairns and Paul Duane, sketches in the full and fascinating picture—enumerating Natan’s achievements, debunking the allegations, and reconstructing a legacy lost to malign neglect. Entitled Nazis, French Port and Film Studies: Bernard Natan’s Strange Saga, by Thomas Doherty, chair of the American-studies program at Brandeis University whose most recent book is Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press, 2013).
Nazis, French Porn, and Film Studies: Bernard Natan's Strange Saga
By Thomas Doherty
Mention Bernard Natan to even the most obsessive connoisseur of French cinema and you’re liable to get a blank stare. If recognized at all, the name might call up a vague association with sleaze and scandal. "Natan", a new documentary from Ireland by the filmmakers David Cairns and Paul Duane, sketches in the full and fascinating picture—enumerating Natan’s achievements, debunking the allegations, and reconstructing a legacy lost to malign neglect.
Natan, né Natan Tannenzapf, was a Romanian Jew who immigrated to Paris in 1905 and went on to become a titan of French film, a man whose brand name, for a time, rivaled that of Gaumont and Pathé, founding fathers of le cinéma français. At once media visionary and rapacious entrepreneur, he burned bright over the City of Lights until an arrest for fraud sent him crashing to earth. Following a sensational trial laced with xenophobia and anti-Semitism, he was sentenced to four years in the Prison de la Santé, in Paris, which is where the Nazis found him. Shipped to Auschwitz, Natan perished in 1943 and promptly vanished—or was he erased?—from historical memory.
Natan seeks to undo the second injustice. At a brisk 66 minutes, it unspools like a much shorter, cinema-centric version of Marcel Ophuls’s epic documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), the searing j’accuse that vaporized the glorious myth of consensual French resistance during the Nazi occupation. Francophilic cinephiles are sometimes afflicted with a similar case of selective amnesia, hailing the subversive frisson of Marcel Carné’sChildren of Paradise (1945) while forgetting the collaborationist filmmakers who adapted to the new regime without missing a beat. A different kind of film noir, Natan unravels the knots in three interlacing threads: the nature of history (whom do we remember and whom do we choose to forget?), the tenacity of French anti-Semitism (where the indigenous variant proves a congenial blend with the imported vintage from Germany), and (here’s where things get strange) the archival shadows of pornography flickering in film studies.
The outlines of Natan’s biography read like a Gallic version of an American rags-to-riches story featuring a colorful hustler who might have fit in well with the moguls who built an empire of their own in Hollywood. A self-made Frenchman, perhaps in nothing so much as his passion for the emerging art of the century, Natan arrived in Paris when the city was still reeling from the actualités of Auguste and Louis Lumière and the prestidigitation of Georges Méliès. Hitting the ground floor running, Natan took any gig available: lab worker and projectionist, tripod carrier and camera-cranker, and, in 1910, an outré credit—probably on a nudie film—that earned him a hefty fine and jail time for trafficking in obscene material. Still, he assimilated with a vengeance, marrying a French Catholic and enlisting in the French army during the Great War. His heroic service at the front was his passport to French citizenship; it also got the prewar bust for obscenity expunged from his record.
Mustered out, Natan assumed a prominent role in rebuilding an industry left prostrate by the Great War and plowed under by Hollywood imports. He acquired exclusive rights to film the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, built high-quality processing plants for developing and duping prints, and moved into the production of top-line features, most notably the patriotic blockbuster The Marvelous Life of Joan of Arc (1929), directed by Marco de Gastyne. Both a detail-oriented manager and a big-picture man, Natan kept a hand in all ends of the business, from the chemicals used in the labs to the interior design of the theaters.
Even before the onset of sound, in 1927, Charles Pathé had lamented that there was no more money to be made from motion pictures. Natan knew better. In 1929 he bought out Pathé—whose "crowing rooster" logo was as much an emblem of ur-Frenchness as the Eiffel Tower—and, under the name Pathé-Natan, set about consolidating his various holdings into a vertically integrated business, a streamlined system of production, distribution, and exhibition, just like the major Hollywood studios. To a remarkable extent, he succeeded—creating big-budget, must-see feature films, building a fleet of ornate theaters, and bringing technical innovations like sound and Technicolor to the French screen. Among the 70 or so feature attractions produced under his shingle are two enduring classics by the director Raymond Bernard: Wooden Crosses (1932), a grim, trench-level slog through the Great War, and Les Misérables (1934), a prestige literary adaptation that, as the documentarians Duane and Cairns cannily note, probably had a personal reverberation for Natan, with its theme of a powerful man haunted by a petty crime from his past.
So far, so business-as-usual, not unlike a TCM documentary on Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer. But then the story detours into a distinctly French quarter. In December 1938, at the height of his power, Natan was hobbled by two indictments, that he was a swindler and a Jew. He could mount a defense against only one. More-scandalous allegations were whispered—actually, in the right-wing press, shouted: that Natan’s long-ago brush with the law was no youthful indiscretion but part of a pattern of perversity. Despite his high profile and respected position, the coverage suggested, the slick foreigner was still peddling pornographic films to an underground market of like-minded lechers. The charges were straight from the playbook of the Nazi propagandists, echoing the double-barreled libels of Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic rag Der Stürmer, where the Jew was depicted as an invasive virus sucking the life out of the body politic while defiling the purity of the native bloodline.
Unfolding from January to June 1939, trumpeted in lurid press headlines, the criminal case against Natan involved cooked books, stock manipulation, and dummy holding companies. In brief, he was accused of robbing his own company blind and cheating the stockholders. He confessed to manipulating funds—but only, he insisted, to keep his company afloat, not to bilk the stockholders. Unmoved, the court sentenced him to four years in prison. In 1940, under the Third Republic and still before the Nazi invasion, the sentence was extended to five years. The next year, a Vichy court deprived him of the French citizenship he had won during the Great War. When the Nazis requested custody of Natan (according to the French Holocaust historian Serge Klarsfeld, Natan was one of only two French Jews targeted by name, the other being Léon Blum, the former prime minister), the Vichy authorities readily complied. As the French film historian Georges Sadoul remarked, Natan’s prison cell served as the "antechamber to the oven of the crematorium."
The obvious French back story to l’affaire Natan is the case of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain whom the French military railroaded into Devil’s Island on a trumped-up charge of treason in 1895. "You might call this the Dreyfus affair of cinema," says the director and actor Frédéric Tachou. But the criminal charges against Natan are a bit harder to disentangle. In 1940, the Hollywood trade paper Variety, which had no dog in the fight, reviewed what it called "the largest scandal ever recorded in the French cinema world" and came down hard on the man in the cross hairs of the French justice system: Natan "built up a monster organization without sound financial foundation and it collapsed of its own dead weight, although it required more than 10 years to bring him to justice."
Nonetheless, a cadre of French film historians has been adamant that Natan was set up; that, despite his confession, he was no less a victim of anti-Semitic hysteria than Dreyfus. André Rossel-Kirschen, Natan’s nephew and the author of Pathé-Natan: the True History, published in France in 2004, attacked the legend of the "swindler Natan" as a smear by greedy business interests seeking to gain control of a company that was not a hollowed-out shell but a solid moneymaker—that, in fact, was always in the black. The French historian Gilles Willems, another diligent researcher in the archives of Pathé, also scorns "the tenacious legend" regarding "the Jewish swindler of Romanian descent, Bernard Natan, who acquired the great Pathé firm the better to pillage it."
For film scholars lacking a Cpa license, the labyrinthine bookkeeping trail is difficult to follow—a confirmation of the cynical Hollywood adage that the most creative people in the motion-picture business work in the studios' accounting departments. In a blog post on the making of the documentary, the filmmaker Cairns offers what seems a measured appraisal: that Natan "did more good than harm" in the annals of French cinema, and that whatever the nature of his financial malfeasance, he "was scapegoated and punished with a grotesque severity."
Ironically, after getting little more than a footnote in most chronicles of the French cinema, Franco or Anglophone, it would be the more scandalous charge that rescued Natan from his cruel fade to black. In 1993, Joseph W. Slade, a professor of media and culture at Ohio University, published an article in the Journal of Film and Video with the come-hither title "Bernard Natan: France’s Legendary Pornographer." The piece was both salacious and, as it turned out, propitious. Slade was a pioneer in what has since morphed into a full-blown subfield of cinema studies—porn studies. Jump-started by the University of California at Berkeley film professor Linda Williams’s Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible,’ published in 1989, and lent momentum by her edited collection, Porn Studies, in 2004, the close textual examination of pornography has turned from what was, not so long ago, an indictable offense into an au courant career path in the academy. Feminist critics especially have cultivated a nonprurient interest in porn, seeing in the raw footage an unfiltered lens into the male—and female—psyche, not to say physique.
Despite smirking from the mainstream press, few media scholars today would argue that a multibillion-dollar industry that has thrived since the dawn of cinema is not worthy of serious scrutiny and archival excavation. That consensus is confirmed by the steady inroads of a series of exceptionally well-attended panels at annual meetings of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and, this spring, the debut of Porn Studies, an academic journal devoted to all things triple-x. If anything, the mainstreaming of porn in media studies has lagged behind its mainstreaming on the motion-picture screen, cable, and the web.
Slade’s article certainly resurrected Natan—not as a forgotten giant of the French film industry, but rather as a priapic smut merchant. Slade charged that even as Natan was consolidating his aboveboard cinematic empire, he "unquestionably turned out some of the most historically significant hard-core footage made during the silent era." More than that, Slade contended that Natan was a featured player in many of the films, exuberantly joining in with the sadomasochism, sodomy, and bestiality. "Natan’s dapper, slightly vulpine figure, capable of stalking or mincing as the role demanded, suited the storylines," he asserted. No prude himself, Slade frankly admired the sheer épater le bourgeois of Natan’s risky moonlighting, pointing out that "as a pornographer," Natan "parodied a bland, reactionary mainstream cinema."
The French, who love a good trans-Atlantic donnybrook over cinema more than a Gitane after dinner, took to the conference-journal-and-cyberspace barricades to defend Natan’s honor. None have been more tenacious than the archivist Brigitte Berg, director of Les Documents Cinématographiques in Paris, who on the website Les indépendants du premier siècle, blasted Slade’s "poor knowledge of both the man Bernard Natan and the French cinema in general" and accused him of "slander," "fantasies," and (the mildest cut) "a rich imagination." (Unfortunately, Berg played no role in Natan, because of creative/scholarly/economic differences with the filmmakers.)
Natan resolves the fracas with a montage worth a thousand monographs: the first extended unreeling of Natan’s alleged on-screen acrobatics. Inarguably, the glimpses of proto-porno from the prewar, silent era possess redeeming archival value, from the posed nudes in nickelodeon-era stag films (pretty much the kind of mild erotica you might see on a visit to the Louvre) to the hard-core coupling, and tripling, of the 1920s and 1930s. The most shocking snippet (I have never seen anything like it and, if I had, I wouldn’t admit it) features a randy swain engaging in sexual congress with a mallard. (The French title—Le Canard—sounds far more genteel than the rhyming imperative that is its English billing.) "The ugliest film I have ever seen in my life," says the archivist Serge Bromberg. "We didn’t want to restore it."
But, of course, the best argument for restoration is that without being able to eyeball the primary source, the canard against Natan would persist. Freeze-framing and telescoping in on close-ups of the actor, the filmmakers compare the visage of the energetic star in the French porn with contemporaneous pictures of Natan, plainly showing that the men are not one and the same. The accusation always sounded unlikely—sort of as if David O. Selznick used his off time during Gone With the Wind (1939) to cavort in blue movies shot in 16mm down in the Valley. On camera, Slade now concedes that there may be reasonable doubt as to the identity of the performer and to Natan’s filmography in pornography. "I do not now believe that Natan performed in the films," he wrote me in an email, "but I do think it is likely that he was involved in their making." Although he finds Natan "somewhat maudlin," he is "delighted that Natan is at last getting the attention he deserves, attention long denied him because of the anti-Semitism that has for so long erased him from French film history."
It is odd, though, that a story that hits so many of the buttons of film scholarship—and that is this juicy—has been for so long so forgotten. "I don’t think he has been airbrushed out" of history, says the writer Bart Bull in Natan. "I think he has been deliberately destroyed." Yet it’s hard to gauge how much of the history in any field just slips down the rabbit hole of memory—like say, the story of the unheralded pioneers of American film, Harry and Roy Aitken, who produced The Birth of a Nation (1915)—and how much results from willful acts of historical erasure. However, one can see why historians of French cinema would rather remember the glory that was the cinéma français than they would the political, cultural, and business sadism, the bigotry and hypocrisy, not to mention the seediness intertwined with the triumphs in the story of Bernard Natan.
Appropriately, the most inspired sequence in Natan is also a work of restoration, though not of a pornographic film, at least not as usually defined. A newsreel clip shows Natan in the dock in 1941, at the trial that stripped him of his citizenship, a sequence that Ophuls also unspooled inThe Sorrow and the Pity. "This is not a comedy," sputters Natan, trying to hide from the cameras. "This is a tragedy." Produced by none other than Pathé Cinema, by then a tool of the Nazi occupation, the newsreel dubs in a panicky high-pitched voice for Natan, to make the outcast Jew sound like a squealing rat. Duane and Cairns correct the distortion, rewinding the clip with Natan’s real voice on the soundtrack. "You can hear his real voice in another clip used in the film where he’s telling architects what he wants in his cinemas," Duane told me in an email. "We pitch-shifted the sped-up voice in the trial newsreel until it was closer to the way he really sounded."
The gesture neatly demonstrates that if film can distort and delete history, it can also restore and repair it. "The man is dead," says the narrator at the beginning of Natan. "Even his memory has been destroyed."
No more.
Nazis, French Porn, and Film Studies: Bernard Natan's Strange Saga
By Thomas Doherty
Mention Bernard Natan to even the most obsessive connoisseur of French cinema and you’re liable to get a blank stare. If recognized at all, the name might call up a vague association with sleaze and scandal. "Natan", a new documentary from Ireland by the filmmakers David Cairns and Paul Duane, sketches in the full and fascinating picture—enumerating Natan’s achievements, debunking the allegations, and reconstructing a legacy lost to malign neglect.
Natan, né Natan Tannenzapf, was a Romanian Jew who immigrated to Paris in 1905 and went on to become a titan of French film, a man whose brand name, for a time, rivaled that of Gaumont and Pathé, founding fathers of le cinéma français. At once media visionary and rapacious entrepreneur, he burned bright over the City of Lights until an arrest for fraud sent him crashing to earth. Following a sensational trial laced with xenophobia and anti-Semitism, he was sentenced to four years in the Prison de la Santé, in Paris, which is where the Nazis found him. Shipped to Auschwitz, Natan perished in 1943 and promptly vanished—or was he erased?—from historical memory.
Natan seeks to undo the second injustice. At a brisk 66 minutes, it unspools like a much shorter, cinema-centric version of Marcel Ophuls’s epic documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), the searing j’accuse that vaporized the glorious myth of consensual French resistance during the Nazi occupation. Francophilic cinephiles are sometimes afflicted with a similar case of selective amnesia, hailing the subversive frisson of Marcel Carné’sChildren of Paradise (1945) while forgetting the collaborationist filmmakers who adapted to the new regime without missing a beat. A different kind of film noir, Natan unravels the knots in three interlacing threads: the nature of history (whom do we remember and whom do we choose to forget?), the tenacity of French anti-Semitism (where the indigenous variant proves a congenial blend with the imported vintage from Germany), and (here’s where things get strange) the archival shadows of pornography flickering in film studies.
The outlines of Natan’s biography read like a Gallic version of an American rags-to-riches story featuring a colorful hustler who might have fit in well with the moguls who built an empire of their own in Hollywood. A self-made Frenchman, perhaps in nothing so much as his passion for the emerging art of the century, Natan arrived in Paris when the city was still reeling from the actualités of Auguste and Louis Lumière and the prestidigitation of Georges Méliès. Hitting the ground floor running, Natan took any gig available: lab worker and projectionist, tripod carrier and camera-cranker, and, in 1910, an outré credit—probably on a nudie film—that earned him a hefty fine and jail time for trafficking in obscene material. Still, he assimilated with a vengeance, marrying a French Catholic and enlisting in the French army during the Great War. His heroic service at the front was his passport to French citizenship; it also got the prewar bust for obscenity expunged from his record.
Mustered out, Natan assumed a prominent role in rebuilding an industry left prostrate by the Great War and plowed under by Hollywood imports. He acquired exclusive rights to film the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, built high-quality processing plants for developing and duping prints, and moved into the production of top-line features, most notably the patriotic blockbuster The Marvelous Life of Joan of Arc (1929), directed by Marco de Gastyne. Both a detail-oriented manager and a big-picture man, Natan kept a hand in all ends of the business, from the chemicals used in the labs to the interior design of the theaters.
Even before the onset of sound, in 1927, Charles Pathé had lamented that there was no more money to be made from motion pictures. Natan knew better. In 1929 he bought out Pathé—whose "crowing rooster" logo was as much an emblem of ur-Frenchness as the Eiffel Tower—and, under the name Pathé-Natan, set about consolidating his various holdings into a vertically integrated business, a streamlined system of production, distribution, and exhibition, just like the major Hollywood studios. To a remarkable extent, he succeeded—creating big-budget, must-see feature films, building a fleet of ornate theaters, and bringing technical innovations like sound and Technicolor to the French screen. Among the 70 or so feature attractions produced under his shingle are two enduring classics by the director Raymond Bernard: Wooden Crosses (1932), a grim, trench-level slog through the Great War, and Les Misérables (1934), a prestige literary adaptation that, as the documentarians Duane and Cairns cannily note, probably had a personal reverberation for Natan, with its theme of a powerful man haunted by a petty crime from his past.
So far, so business-as-usual, not unlike a TCM documentary on Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer. But then the story detours into a distinctly French quarter. In December 1938, at the height of his power, Natan was hobbled by two indictments, that he was a swindler and a Jew. He could mount a defense against only one. More-scandalous allegations were whispered—actually, in the right-wing press, shouted: that Natan’s long-ago brush with the law was no youthful indiscretion but part of a pattern of perversity. Despite his high profile and respected position, the coverage suggested, the slick foreigner was still peddling pornographic films to an underground market of like-minded lechers. The charges were straight from the playbook of the Nazi propagandists, echoing the double-barreled libels of Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic rag Der Stürmer, where the Jew was depicted as an invasive virus sucking the life out of the body politic while defiling the purity of the native bloodline.
Unfolding from January to June 1939, trumpeted in lurid press headlines, the criminal case against Natan involved cooked books, stock manipulation, and dummy holding companies. In brief, he was accused of robbing his own company blind and cheating the stockholders. He confessed to manipulating funds—but only, he insisted, to keep his company afloat, not to bilk the stockholders. Unmoved, the court sentenced him to four years in prison. In 1940, under the Third Republic and still before the Nazi invasion, the sentence was extended to five years. The next year, a Vichy court deprived him of the French citizenship he had won during the Great War. When the Nazis requested custody of Natan (according to the French Holocaust historian Serge Klarsfeld, Natan was one of only two French Jews targeted by name, the other being Léon Blum, the former prime minister), the Vichy authorities readily complied. As the French film historian Georges Sadoul remarked, Natan’s prison cell served as the "antechamber to the oven of the crematorium."
The obvious French back story to l’affaire Natan is the case of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain whom the French military railroaded into Devil’s Island on a trumped-up charge of treason in 1895. "You might call this the Dreyfus affair of cinema," says the director and actor Frédéric Tachou. But the criminal charges against Natan are a bit harder to disentangle. In 1940, the Hollywood trade paper Variety, which had no dog in the fight, reviewed what it called "the largest scandal ever recorded in the French cinema world" and came down hard on the man in the cross hairs of the French justice system: Natan "built up a monster organization without sound financial foundation and it collapsed of its own dead weight, although it required more than 10 years to bring him to justice."
Nonetheless, a cadre of French film historians has been adamant that Natan was set up; that, despite his confession, he was no less a victim of anti-Semitic hysteria than Dreyfus. André Rossel-Kirschen, Natan’s nephew and the author of Pathé-Natan: the True History, published in France in 2004, attacked the legend of the "swindler Natan" as a smear by greedy business interests seeking to gain control of a company that was not a hollowed-out shell but a solid moneymaker—that, in fact, was always in the black. The French historian Gilles Willems, another diligent researcher in the archives of Pathé, also scorns "the tenacious legend" regarding "the Jewish swindler of Romanian descent, Bernard Natan, who acquired the great Pathé firm the better to pillage it."
For film scholars lacking a Cpa license, the labyrinthine bookkeeping trail is difficult to follow—a confirmation of the cynical Hollywood adage that the most creative people in the motion-picture business work in the studios' accounting departments. In a blog post on the making of the documentary, the filmmaker Cairns offers what seems a measured appraisal: that Natan "did more good than harm" in the annals of French cinema, and that whatever the nature of his financial malfeasance, he "was scapegoated and punished with a grotesque severity."
Ironically, after getting little more than a footnote in most chronicles of the French cinema, Franco or Anglophone, it would be the more scandalous charge that rescued Natan from his cruel fade to black. In 1993, Joseph W. Slade, a professor of media and culture at Ohio University, published an article in the Journal of Film and Video with the come-hither title "Bernard Natan: France’s Legendary Pornographer." The piece was both salacious and, as it turned out, propitious. Slade was a pioneer in what has since morphed into a full-blown subfield of cinema studies—porn studies. Jump-started by the University of California at Berkeley film professor Linda Williams’s Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible,’ published in 1989, and lent momentum by her edited collection, Porn Studies, in 2004, the close textual examination of pornography has turned from what was, not so long ago, an indictable offense into an au courant career path in the academy. Feminist critics especially have cultivated a nonprurient interest in porn, seeing in the raw footage an unfiltered lens into the male—and female—psyche, not to say physique.
Despite smirking from the mainstream press, few media scholars today would argue that a multibillion-dollar industry that has thrived since the dawn of cinema is not worthy of serious scrutiny and archival excavation. That consensus is confirmed by the steady inroads of a series of exceptionally well-attended panels at annual meetings of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and, this spring, the debut of Porn Studies, an academic journal devoted to all things triple-x. If anything, the mainstreaming of porn in media studies has lagged behind its mainstreaming on the motion-picture screen, cable, and the web.
Slade’s article certainly resurrected Natan—not as a forgotten giant of the French film industry, but rather as a priapic smut merchant. Slade charged that even as Natan was consolidating his aboveboard cinematic empire, he "unquestionably turned out some of the most historically significant hard-core footage made during the silent era." More than that, Slade contended that Natan was a featured player in many of the films, exuberantly joining in with the sadomasochism, sodomy, and bestiality. "Natan’s dapper, slightly vulpine figure, capable of stalking or mincing as the role demanded, suited the storylines," he asserted. No prude himself, Slade frankly admired the sheer épater le bourgeois of Natan’s risky moonlighting, pointing out that "as a pornographer," Natan "parodied a bland, reactionary mainstream cinema."
The French, who love a good trans-Atlantic donnybrook over cinema more than a Gitane after dinner, took to the conference-journal-and-cyberspace barricades to defend Natan’s honor. None have been more tenacious than the archivist Brigitte Berg, director of Les Documents Cinématographiques in Paris, who on the website Les indépendants du premier siècle, blasted Slade’s "poor knowledge of both the man Bernard Natan and the French cinema in general" and accused him of "slander," "fantasies," and (the mildest cut) "a rich imagination." (Unfortunately, Berg played no role in Natan, because of creative/scholarly/economic differences with the filmmakers.)
Natan resolves the fracas with a montage worth a thousand monographs: the first extended unreeling of Natan’s alleged on-screen acrobatics. Inarguably, the glimpses of proto-porno from the prewar, silent era possess redeeming archival value, from the posed nudes in nickelodeon-era stag films (pretty much the kind of mild erotica you might see on a visit to the Louvre) to the hard-core coupling, and tripling, of the 1920s and 1930s. The most shocking snippet (I have never seen anything like it and, if I had, I wouldn’t admit it) features a randy swain engaging in sexual congress with a mallard. (The French title—Le Canard—sounds far more genteel than the rhyming imperative that is its English billing.) "The ugliest film I have ever seen in my life," says the archivist Serge Bromberg. "We didn’t want to restore it."
But, of course, the best argument for restoration is that without being able to eyeball the primary source, the canard against Natan would persist. Freeze-framing and telescoping in on close-ups of the actor, the filmmakers compare the visage of the energetic star in the French porn with contemporaneous pictures of Natan, plainly showing that the men are not one and the same. The accusation always sounded unlikely—sort of as if David O. Selznick used his off time during Gone With the Wind (1939) to cavort in blue movies shot in 16mm down in the Valley. On camera, Slade now concedes that there may be reasonable doubt as to the identity of the performer and to Natan’s filmography in pornography. "I do not now believe that Natan performed in the films," he wrote me in an email, "but I do think it is likely that he was involved in their making." Although he finds Natan "somewhat maudlin," he is "delighted that Natan is at last getting the attention he deserves, attention long denied him because of the anti-Semitism that has for so long erased him from French film history."
It is odd, though, that a story that hits so many of the buttons of film scholarship—and that is this juicy—has been for so long so forgotten. "I don’t think he has been airbrushed out" of history, says the writer Bart Bull in Natan. "I think he has been deliberately destroyed." Yet it’s hard to gauge how much of the history in any field just slips down the rabbit hole of memory—like say, the story of the unheralded pioneers of American film, Harry and Roy Aitken, who produced The Birth of a Nation (1915)—and how much results from willful acts of historical erasure. However, one can see why historians of French cinema would rather remember the glory that was the cinéma français than they would the political, cultural, and business sadism, the bigotry and hypocrisy, not to mention the seediness intertwined with the triumphs in the story of Bernard Natan.
Appropriately, the most inspired sequence in Natan is also a work of restoration, though not of a pornographic film, at least not as usually defined. A newsreel clip shows Natan in the dock in 1941, at the trial that stripped him of his citizenship, a sequence that Ophuls also unspooled inThe Sorrow and the Pity. "This is not a comedy," sputters Natan, trying to hide from the cameras. "This is a tragedy." Produced by none other than Pathé Cinema, by then a tool of the Nazi occupation, the newsreel dubs in a panicky high-pitched voice for Natan, to make the outcast Jew sound like a squealing rat. Duane and Cairns correct the distortion, rewinding the clip with Natan’s real voice on the soundtrack. "You can hear his real voice in another clip used in the film where he’s telling architects what he wants in his cinemas," Duane told me in an email. "We pitch-shifted the sped-up voice in the trial newsreel until it was closer to the way he really sounded."
The gesture neatly demonstrates that if film can distort and delete history, it can also restore and repair it. "The man is dead," says the narrator at the beginning of Natan. "Even his memory has been destroyed."
No more.
- 6/12/2014
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
Cinema, as Jean-Luc Godard wrote, is truth 24 times a second. Documentaries both prove and disprove the point; but the truth is their strongest weapon. Here, Guardian and Observer critics pick the 10 best
• Top 10 arthouse movies
• Top 10 family movies
• Top 10 war movies
• Top 10 teen movies
• Top 10 superhero movies
• Top 10 westerns
• More Guardian and Observer critics' top 10s
10. Man With a Movie Camera
To best understand this 1929 silent documentary, one ought to know that its director, the exotically named "Dziga Vertov", was actually born David Abelevich Kaufman in 1896. Some say the name derives from the Russian word for spinning top, but the pseudonym is more likely an onomatopeic approximation of the sound made by the twin reels of film as the director ran them backwards and forwards through his flatbed editor. For Vertov, film was something physical, to be manipulated by man, and yet, paradoxically, he also saw it as a medium...
• Top 10 arthouse movies
• Top 10 family movies
• Top 10 war movies
• Top 10 teen movies
• Top 10 superhero movies
• Top 10 westerns
• More Guardian and Observer critics' top 10s
10. Man With a Movie Camera
To best understand this 1929 silent documentary, one ought to know that its director, the exotically named "Dziga Vertov", was actually born David Abelevich Kaufman in 1896. Some say the name derives from the Russian word for spinning top, but the pseudonym is more likely an onomatopeic approximation of the sound made by the twin reels of film as the director ran them backwards and forwards through his flatbed editor. For Vertov, film was something physical, to be manipulated by man, and yet, paradoxically, he also saw it as a medium...
- 11/12/2013
- The Guardian - Film News
Ain’t Misbehavin’ – Marcel Ophüls
Section: Tiff Docs
Dates: Tuesday 10th, Thursday 12th, Sunday 15th
Buzz: The freewheeling memoir Ain’t Misbehavin’ (titled Un Voyageur in French) screened alongside Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune during Director’s Fortnight at Cannes. While the latter is perhaps the most buzzed about Tiff Doc, the first feature from Marcel Ophüls in nearly two decades should not be overlooked. The son of celebrated German-Jewish filmmaker Max Ophüls (The Earrings of Madame de …) and friend of François Truffaut, the master documentarian, now eighty-five years old, has lived an extraordinary life. Marcel Ophüls won the Academy Award for Best Documentary and the Fipresci Award at Cannes for Hotel Terminus (1988), while his Oscar nominated, four-hour long The Sorrow and The Pity (1969), that explored French resistance and collaboration with Nazis was memorialized in Annie Hall. After the endless critical praise for his Holocaust-related material, it will be...
Section: Tiff Docs
Dates: Tuesday 10th, Thursday 12th, Sunday 15th
Buzz: The freewheeling memoir Ain’t Misbehavin’ (titled Un Voyageur in French) screened alongside Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune during Director’s Fortnight at Cannes. While the latter is perhaps the most buzzed about Tiff Doc, the first feature from Marcel Ophüls in nearly two decades should not be overlooked. The son of celebrated German-Jewish filmmaker Max Ophüls (The Earrings of Madame de …) and friend of François Truffaut, the master documentarian, now eighty-five years old, has lived an extraordinary life. Marcel Ophüls won the Academy Award for Best Documentary and the Fipresci Award at Cannes for Hotel Terminus (1988), while his Oscar nominated, four-hour long The Sorrow and The Pity (1969), that explored French resistance and collaboration with Nazis was memorialized in Annie Hall. After the endless critical praise for his Holocaust-related material, it will be...
- 9/2/2013
- by Caitlin Coder
- IONCINEMA.com
The 2013 Toronto International Film Festival has set its documentary program to start unspooling when the festival launches September 5. The subjects range from Donald Rumsfeld to Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione and the Congo. Here are the films: A Story Of Children And Film Mark Cousins, United Kingdom North American Premiere A Story of Children and Film is the world’s first movie about kids in global cinema. A passionate, poetic portrait of the adventures of childhood — its surrealism, loneliness, fun, destructiveness and vitality — as seen through 53 great films from 25 countries, director Mark Cousins’ landmark film is an eye opener and a celebration of both childhood and the movies. Ain’t Misbehavin’ Marcel Ophüls, France North American Premiere The director of The Sorrow and the Pity shares his memories with us, stories both incredibly rich and fascinating, making Ain’t Misbehavin’ a cheerful and bittersweet trip through cinema history. Son of the great director Max Ophüls,...
- 7/30/2013
- by MIKE FLEMING JR
- Deadline
New documentaries from acclaimed filmmakers Claude Lanzmann ("Shoah"), Marcel Ophuls ("The Sorrow and the Pity"), Frederick Wiseman ("Titicut Follies") and Errol Morris ("The Thin Blue Line") highlight the typically strong doc lineup at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, Tiff organizers announced on Tuesday. Lanzmann will be represented with "The Last of the Unjust" (photo above), which chronicles the last president of the Jewish council in the Theresienstadt ghetto in World War II. Ophuls has "Ain't Misbehavin'," an autobiographical doc. Wiseman's "At Berkeley" looks at the Uc Berkeley campus in the...
- 7/30/2013
- by Steve Pond
- The Wrap
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has revealed its 276-member-strong class of 2013.
The list, published by The Hollywood Reporter, includes actors, cinematographers, designers, directors, documentarians, executives, film editors, makeup artists and hairstylists, "members-at-large," musicians, producers, PR folks, short filmmakers and animators, sound technicians, visual effects artists, and writers.
Jason Bateman, Rosario Dawson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Milla Jovovich, Lucy Liu, Jennifer Lopez, Emily Mortimer, Sandra Oh, Jason Schwartzman, and Michael Peña are among the roster of actors, while "The Heat" and "Bridesmaids" helmer Paul Feig made the directors' cut.
"We did not change our criteria at all," says Academy president Hawk Koch of this year's larger-than-usual class. "Yes, this year there is a tremendous amount of women, a tremendous amount of people of color, people from all walks of life. This year, we asked the branches to look at everybody who wasn't in the Academy but who deserved to be.
The list, published by The Hollywood Reporter, includes actors, cinematographers, designers, directors, documentarians, executives, film editors, makeup artists and hairstylists, "members-at-large," musicians, producers, PR folks, short filmmakers and animators, sound technicians, visual effects artists, and writers.
Jason Bateman, Rosario Dawson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Milla Jovovich, Lucy Liu, Jennifer Lopez, Emily Mortimer, Sandra Oh, Jason Schwartzman, and Michael Peña are among the roster of actors, while "The Heat" and "Bridesmaids" helmer Paul Feig made the directors' cut.
"We did not change our criteria at all," says Academy president Hawk Koch of this year's larger-than-usual class. "Yes, this year there is a tremendous amount of women, a tremendous amount of people of color, people from all walks of life. This year, we asked the branches to look at everybody who wasn't in the Academy but who deserved to be.
- 7/4/2013
- by Laura Larson
- Moviefone
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced today the 276 members of the entertainment industry invited to join organization. The list includes actors, directors, documentarians, executives, film editors, producers and more. Of those listed below, those who accept the invitations will be the only additions to the Academy's membership in 2013. "These individuals are among the best filmmakers working in the industry today," said Academy President Hawk Koch in a press release. "Their talent and creativity have captured the imagination of audiences worldwide, and I am proud to welcome each of them to the Academy." Koch also told Variety, "In the past eight or nine years, each branch could only bring in X amount of members. There were people each branch would have liked to get in but couldn't. We asked them to be more inclusive of the best of the best, and each branch was excited, because they got...
- 6/28/2013
- by Brad Brevet
- Rope of Silicon
The Academy just added 276 Oscar voters.
That’s 100 more than last year, and part of an easing of a longstanding cap on the number of new members allowed to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences each year.
AMPAS usually adds between 130 and 180 new members, replacing those who have quit or passed away. The membership now stands around 6,000.
Jason Bateman, Jennifer Lopez, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emmanuelle Riva, and Chris Tucker are among the actors who have been invited to join, the organization announced today.
Other interesting additions: the musician Prince, Girls and Tiny Furniture writer/director/actress Lena Dunham,...
That’s 100 more than last year, and part of an easing of a longstanding cap on the number of new members allowed to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences each year.
AMPAS usually adds between 130 and 180 new members, replacing those who have quit or passed away. The membership now stands around 6,000.
Jason Bateman, Jennifer Lopez, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emmanuelle Riva, and Chris Tucker are among the actors who have been invited to join, the organization announced today.
Other interesting additions: the musician Prince, Girls and Tiny Furniture writer/director/actress Lena Dunham,...
- 6/28/2013
- by Anthony Breznican
- EW - Inside Movies
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is extending invitations to join the organization to 276 artists and executives who have distinguished themselves by their contributions to theatrical motion pictures. Those who accept the invitations will be the only additions to the Academy’s membership in 2013.
“These individuals are among the best filmmakers working in the industry today,” said Academy President Hawk Koch. “Their talent and creativity have captured the imagination of audiences worldwide, and I am proud to welcome each of them to the Academy.”
The 2013 invitees are:
Actors
Jason Bateman – “Up in the Air,” “Juno”
Miriam Colon – “City of Hope,” “Scarface”
Rosario Dawson – “Rent,” “Frank Miller’s Sin City”
Kimberly Elise – “For Colored Girls,” “Beloved”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt – “Lincoln,” “The Dark Knight Rises”
Charles Grodin – “Midnight Run,” “The Heartbreak Kid”
Rebecca Hall – “Iron Man 3,” “The Town”
Lance Henriksen – “Aliens,” “The Terminator”
Jack Huston – “Not Fade Away,” “Factory Girl”
Milla Jovovich – “Resident Evil,...
“These individuals are among the best filmmakers working in the industry today,” said Academy President Hawk Koch. “Their talent and creativity have captured the imagination of audiences worldwide, and I am proud to welcome each of them to the Academy.”
The 2013 invitees are:
Actors
Jason Bateman – “Up in the Air,” “Juno”
Miriam Colon – “City of Hope,” “Scarface”
Rosario Dawson – “Rent,” “Frank Miller’s Sin City”
Kimberly Elise – “For Colored Girls,” “Beloved”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt – “Lincoln,” “The Dark Knight Rises”
Charles Grodin – “Midnight Run,” “The Heartbreak Kid”
Rebecca Hall – “Iron Man 3,” “The Town”
Lance Henriksen – “Aliens,” “The Terminator”
Jack Huston – “Not Fade Away,” “Factory Girl”
Milla Jovovich – “Resident Evil,...
- 6/28/2013
- by Michelle McCue
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Time will tell, but as of now, The Cannes Director's Fortnight program this year looks like a more well-rounded, eccentric group of films than the competition. It's a lineup where, for example, Jim Mickle's Sundance selected cannibalism tale We Are What We Are plays alongside the latest from The Sorrow and the Pity director Marcel Ophuls. It also ranges from old masters like Alejandro Jordorowsky, presenting his new autobiographical film, The Dance of Reality to new genre filmmakers like Jeremy Saulnier (Murder Party) who is showing Blue Ruin. It also includes a number of Fortnight alumni, notably Gangs of Wasseypur director Anurag Kashyap, who will premiere his new film Ugly, a thriller set in Mumbai. Here is the full lineup:Features The Congress, dir: Ari Folman...
[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...
[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...
- 4/23/2013
- Screen Anarchy
2016 movie still trailing Michael Moore, Al Gore 2016 Obama's America, Dinesh D'Souza and John Sullivan's anti-Obama documentary, has surpassed the concert movie Katy Perry: Part of Me to become the second highest-grossing non-fiction film released in North America in 2012. By Sunday evening, D'Souza and Sullivan's right-wing doc -- current cume according to the web site Box Office Mojo stands at an estimated $27.66 million (as of Wed., September 13) -- should have also surpassed the nature doc Chimpanzee ($28.97 million) to become the year's top documentary in the United States and Canada. Worldwide, 2016 -- a 100% domestic sleeper hit like, say, the Tyler Perry movies (which have no audience overseas) -- remains behind both Chimpanzee (another domestic-only release) and Katy Perry: Part of Me. (Please scroll down for more details about the box-office performances of non-fiction films worldwide both in 2012 and "all-time.") As per numerous box-office reports, as the sixth biggest non-fiction film ever (or rather,...
- 9/13/2012
- by Zac Gille
- Alt Film Guide
How a DVD landslide swept me back in time
The other day I brushed incautiously against a packed, unstable shelf in my bedroom and caused a catastrophic DVD-slide, which almost swept me down the stairs and into the street. It took 40 sweaty and bad-tempered minutes to stuff them back in, as semi-forgotten films suddenly pressed themselves on my consciousness. Enter the Dragon. The Sorrow and the Pity. Dodgeball.
Every time I look, I have more DVDs. Hundreds. Are they breeding? They are double- and triple-stacked. The ones at the back are condemned to be utterly forgotten. Many more are crammed horizontally over the top, always the sign of a neglected shelf. Film companies send me discs in the hope of a review. I now have enough to fill a skip.
Putting all those DVDs back was a strange experience. In his essay Unpacking My Library, Walter Benjamin recounts the smell...
The other day I brushed incautiously against a packed, unstable shelf in my bedroom and caused a catastrophic DVD-slide, which almost swept me down the stairs and into the street. It took 40 sweaty and bad-tempered minutes to stuff them back in, as semi-forgotten films suddenly pressed themselves on my consciousness. Enter the Dragon. The Sorrow and the Pity. Dodgeball.
Every time I look, I have more DVDs. Hundreds. Are they breeding? They are double- and triple-stacked. The ones at the back are condemned to be utterly forgotten. Many more are crammed horizontally over the top, always the sign of a neglected shelf. Film companies send me discs in the hope of a review. I now have enough to fill a skip.
Putting all those DVDs back was a strange experience. In his essay Unpacking My Library, Walter Benjamin recounts the smell...
- 6/10/2012
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
A Prophet star Tahar Rahim joins the latest resistance movie
For French film-makers, the German occupation of their country between 1940 and 1944 has been, for nearly 70 years now, fertile if painful territory, offering an ocean of stories, a multiplicity of perspectives. The latest entry in the field of the occupation movie is Free Men, which examines the hitherto overlooked story of Muslims from France's north African colonial possessions, involved in the Paris black market and the selling of forged documents, who came to transcend the enmity between Muslims and Jews in order to better aid the latter. It stars Tahar Rahim (A Prophet), as an illiterate Algerian immigrant, blackmailed by the Germans into surveilling his local mosque, who ends up shooting Nazis and collaborators in the streets – all in a war that isn't really his (and yet … as one politically clued-up Muslim co-conspirator advises him: "Today this, tomorrow Algeria"). The film...
For French film-makers, the German occupation of their country between 1940 and 1944 has been, for nearly 70 years now, fertile if painful territory, offering an ocean of stories, a multiplicity of perspectives. The latest entry in the field of the occupation movie is Free Men, which examines the hitherto overlooked story of Muslims from France's north African colonial possessions, involved in the Paris black market and the selling of forged documents, who came to transcend the enmity between Muslims and Jews in order to better aid the latter. It stars Tahar Rahim (A Prophet), as an illiterate Algerian immigrant, blackmailed by the Germans into surveilling his local mosque, who ends up shooting Nazis and collaborators in the streets – all in a war that isn't really his (and yet … as one politically clued-up Muslim co-conspirator advises him: "Today this, tomorrow Algeria"). The film...
- 5/18/2012
- by John Patterson
- The Guardian - Film News
This Friday is the 35th anniversary of "Annie Hall." The Woody Allen favorite, which won Best Picture in 1977 -- beating out "Star Wars" -- made "The Sorrow and The Pity," spider killing and neurotic rants a necessary part of romance. But "Annie Hall" also goes down as a pioneer of tackling the awkward first date (and thus holds the copyright for the funniest subtitles ever). So, in honor of the movie's anniversary, we put together some more awkward movie dates for your cringe-worthy enjoyment. La-di-da! Watch:...
- 4/17/2012
- by Jessie Heyman
- Moviefone
France's deportation of 13,000 Jews, once a taboo, is at last being properly remembered
Paris, July 1942: a thud on an apartment door. It's the French police, come to take away a Jewish family. To try to save her four-year-old brother, Thomas, 10-year-old Sarah locks him in a closet and takes the key with her. In Sarah's Key, a searing film out this weekend, Kristin Scott Thomas plays Julia, a present-day American journalist investigating the family's fate. It's the second feature within a year to tackle the "rafle", the round-up of Jews on 16-17 July 1942 in Paris. What took France so long?
The events are beyond dispute: 13,000 Jews were herded into the indoor cycle track, the Vélodrome d'Hiver. There they were kept for five nights without food or medicine. Of the 10 toilets, five were sealed and most of the rest blocked. There was one tap. From the "Vel" they were taken to the Drancy,...
Paris, July 1942: a thud on an apartment door. It's the French police, come to take away a Jewish family. To try to save her four-year-old brother, Thomas, 10-year-old Sarah locks him in a closet and takes the key with her. In Sarah's Key, a searing film out this weekend, Kristin Scott Thomas plays Julia, a present-day American journalist investigating the family's fate. It's the second feature within a year to tackle the "rafle", the round-up of Jews on 16-17 July 1942 in Paris. What took France so long?
The events are beyond dispute: 13,000 Jews were herded into the indoor cycle track, the Vélodrome d'Hiver. There they were kept for five nights without food or medicine. Of the 10 toilets, five were sealed and most of the rest blocked. There was one tap. From the "Vel" they were taken to the Drancy,...
- 8/7/2011
- by Anne Karpf
- The Guardian - Film News
I’m always looking to expand my familiarity with classic documentaries. And Netflix has typically delivered. In fact, until recently the service was streaming a number of famed old nonfiction titles available through The Criterion Collection. Such classics as Salesman, Grey Gardens, Sans Soleil, Burden of Dreams, Hearts and Minds and Harlan County U.S.A. are still currently available in disc form, but for immediate online viewing you have to head over to Hulu, and you’ll need a Plus account for most. At least Hoop Dreams is still somehow on Netflix Watch Instantly (it appears to not be Criterion’s copy), as are plenty of other must-see doc classics like Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, The Sorrow and the Pity, The Thin Blue Line, Triumph of the Will, Man...
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- 7/27/2011
- by Movies.com
- Movies.com - Celebrity Gossip
I’m always looking to expand my familiarity with classic documentaries. And Netflix has typically delivered. In fact, until recently the service was streaming a number of famed old nonfiction titles available through The Criterion Collection. Such classics as Salesman, Grey Gardens, Sans Soleil, Burden of Dreams, Hearts and Minds and Harlan County U.S.A. are still currently available in disc form, but for immediate online viewing you have to head over to Hulu, and you’ll need a Plus account for most. At least Hoop Dreams is still somehow on Netflix Watch Instantly (it appears to not be Criterion’s copy), as are plenty of other must-see doc classics like Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, The Sorrow and the Pity, The Thin Blue Line, Triumph of the Will, Man...
Read More...
Read More...
- 7/27/2011
- by Movies.com
- Movies.com
It seems like only yesterday that the American Film Institute released their 100 Years...100 Movies [1] list. Actually though, it was over 10 years ago when we first got our look at that "definitive" list of the 100 best American movies. They then did a ten year anniversary of it in 2007 with only minor adjustments and both years Citizen Kane held the number one place as the best American movie. Of course, the problem with those lists is that they only list American films. While Hollywood might be considered the epicenter of film, the art form itself spans the globe, way beyond American borders. That's why the Toronto International Film Festival came up with their Essential 100 movies. Created by merging lists made by Toronto Film Festival supporters along with another made by their programmers, these are supposed to be the 100 essential movies every cinephile must see. And it starts off with a bang as Citizen Kane has been toppled.
- 12/22/2010
- by Germain Lussier
- Slash Film
I truly am going to miss waking up to find out what the comics world thought of "Lost" the night before, but we've still got one more episode left. You may or may not share a common perspective on unresolved plot threads with Rob Liefeld, Mark Brooks and Rob Williams. You also may or may not share Ande Parks' thoughts on his former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania Arlen Specter's lost his primary yesterday.
Everyone, however, can share Avengers Day with Brian Michael Bendis. He and David Aja both decided to celebrate in their own ways. Find out if you want to follow their leads after the jump. There, you can also see Jonathan Hickman's favorite Legion villains and how Mike Oeming reacts when he's mistaken for David Petersen.
It's all retweeted in the Twitter Report for May 19, 2010.
Avengers Day pt. 1: @Brianmbendis find an ex-girlfriend who dumped you,...
Everyone, however, can share Avengers Day with Brian Michael Bendis. He and David Aja both decided to celebrate in their own ways. Find out if you want to follow their leads after the jump. There, you can also see Jonathan Hickman's favorite Legion villains and how Mike Oeming reacts when he's mistaken for David Petersen.
It's all retweeted in the Twitter Report for May 19, 2010.
Avengers Day pt. 1: @Brianmbendis find an ex-girlfriend who dumped you,...
- 5/19/2010
- by Brian Warmoth
- MTV Splash Page
Stephen Poliakoff's antipathy towards the peacemakers of 1939 reveals cinema's love of a futile struggle
The movies have played their part in giving appeasement a bad name. Conflict, not surrender, is the essence of drama. Hence, Princess Leia can't be allowed to knuckle under to the Evil Empire, whatever fate resistance might precipitate. On the big screen, plucky fighters against the odds are celebrated in a galaxy of westerns, war films and thrillers. Those who decide that discretion is the better part of valour get Le Chagrin et la Pitié.
Yet in the animal kingdom, appeasement is a routine behavioural strategy. Our fellow creatures find themselves in contention with each other far more frequently than we do. Nonetheless, they fight to the death less often than you would think. Instead, they will size up a rival and assess their chances of beating him in combat. When they conclude that they are outclassed,...
The movies have played their part in giving appeasement a bad name. Conflict, not surrender, is the essence of drama. Hence, Princess Leia can't be allowed to knuckle under to the Evil Empire, whatever fate resistance might precipitate. On the big screen, plucky fighters against the odds are celebrated in a galaxy of westerns, war films and thrillers. Those who decide that discretion is the better part of valour get Le Chagrin et la Pitié.
Yet in the animal kingdom, appeasement is a routine behavioural strategy. Our fellow creatures find themselves in contention with each other far more frequently than we do. Nonetheless, they fight to the death less often than you would think. Instead, they will size up a rival and assess their chances of beating him in combat. When they conclude that they are outclassed,...
- 11/23/2009
- by David Cox
- The Guardian - Film News
For DocuWeek I had the chance to screen the enlightening film Dirt: The Movie! Here's a little interview with directors Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow for your reading pleasure.
Heidi: Before we start, let me say that I am really glad I got to see your film. I keep up on eco-issues, I own two hybrids, feed my kid organically as often as possible, am a vegetarian, all that, but your film was an incredibly fresh and eye-opening take on so many issues.
Sure, I knew about the disappearance of the bees, about water issues, and deforestation, but I'd never even thought about the dirt. So thank you for the education.
First Question: What initially inspired you to make this film?
Bill: Thanks for the questions and your interest and appreciation of our film. The start of my answer would have to be in two parts: 1. My mother, Dorothy Cullman,...
Heidi: Before we start, let me say that I am really glad I got to see your film. I keep up on eco-issues, I own two hybrids, feed my kid organically as often as possible, am a vegetarian, all that, but your film was an incredibly fresh and eye-opening take on so many issues.
Sure, I knew about the disappearance of the bees, about water issues, and deforestation, but I'd never even thought about the dirt. So thank you for the education.
First Question: What initially inspired you to make this film?
Bill: Thanks for the questions and your interest and appreciation of our film. The start of my answer would have to be in two parts: 1. My mother, Dorothy Cullman,...
- 9/16/2009
- by ccohagan
- Film Independent
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