"Natan" at the Museum of the Moving Image

“The Jews, Masters of the French Cinema,” reads the head of an appalling photo-mural from pre-Vichy France, an upset­ting and strik­ing image from Natan. 

David Cairns, the blog­ger behind shad­ow­play, is also the co-director, with Paul Duane, behind Natan, a remark­able short fea­ture doc­u­ment­ary hav­ing its New York première at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, on Sunday January 19^th at four in the after­noon. Duane will be present for a post-screening Q&A. 

The movie opens with a series of sepia-toned images as the smooth but hefty tones of Scottish act­or Gavin Mitchell address the audi­ence: “Imagine a man has been murdered. The body has been burned. What’s left…” Yes, what is left? The movie got its hook into me right away, and nev­er let up. 

Natan is, among oth­er things, a remark­able piece of cinephile detect­ive work. Its sub­ject should be a cel­eb­rated legend of French cinema. As an over­seer of the great French stu­dio Pathe, which for a time also bore his own name, Bernard Natan pro­duced and/or presen­ted films by Rene Clair, Raymond Bernard, and Marcel L’Herbier. He was also, it seemed, a tire­less innov­at­or with respect to dis­tri­bu­tion and exhib­i­tion. He was also, accord­ing to some sources, an early pro­du­cer of por­no­graph­ic films and a some time act­or in them. He was indis­put­ably a Romanian-born Jew, finally, and that proved his undo­ing in Vichy France—thanks in part to anti-Semitism stoked in the coun­try well before Hitler’s troops ever set foot in it. 

When David, who’s a pal, gave me a heads-up on the movie, he said that he hoped that I would find it “packed with inform­a­tion, out­rage, and emo­tion.” Indeed. The movie does not attempt a “rehab­il­it­a­tion” of Natan so much as insist that such a state of affairs in which such a treat­ment were needed is, in itself, an awful injustice. It does this using meth­ods that are risk-taking by con­ven­tiona doc­u­ment­ary stand­ards, with an act­or silently stand­ing in for Natan as nar­rat­or Mitchell assumes the man’s voice. Scholars and writer such as Serge Bromberg and an espe­cially impas­sioned Bart Bull, and Natan’s own grand­daugh­ter, express indig­na­tion over Natan’s fate even as Cairns and Duane care­fully unpack all the avail­able data con­cern­ing cer­tain alleg­a­tions against the man, and reach a tacit con­clu­sion that there are some things about the man that we’ll nev­er be able to know. The tra­gic, con­vo­luted story isn’t just for cinephiles—it’s for any­one con­sumed by the mys­ter­ies of man­kind and the glor­ies it aspires to, and alas, the atro­cit­ies it com­mits. See it.