When Martin Scorsese strikes up a relationship with his cinematographer, the collaboration tends to last for more than one film. Throughout his legendary career, Scorsese has worked repeatedly with such top names in the art of cinematography as Michael Chapman, Michael Ballhaus, Robert Richardson, and now Rodrigo Prieto. The acclaimed cinematographer, who was an Oscar nominee for “Brokeback Mountain,” has been at Scorsese’s side for the last four of the master filmmaker’s projects. During that run, Prieto has received three Oscar nominations for his artistry.
“It is crazy to imagine that I could even one day in my career say, ‘Yeah, it’s my third nomination with Martin Scorsese for an Oscar.’ What are you talking about?” Prieto, who was nominated this year for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview. “It’s thrilling and I feel very privileged to be in this position.
“It is crazy to imagine that I could even one day in my career say, ‘Yeah, it’s my third nomination with Martin Scorsese for an Oscar.’ What are you talking about?” Prieto, who was nominated this year for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview. “It’s thrilling and I feel very privileged to be in this position.
- 2/8/2024
- by Christopher Rosen
- Gold Derby
Thierry Frémaux is best known internationally as the long-time head of France’s Cannes Film Festival, which is organized out of its offices in Paris’s trendy Marais neighborhood.
The double-hatted cinema expert is perhaps more in his element in his home city of Lyon, where he is the director of the Institut Lumière, situated on the site of the former mansion and factory of cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière.
Alongside its late co-founders Bernard Chardère and Bertrand Tavernier, Frémaux has been a driving force behind the expansion of the institute and its activities, including the creation of its classic cinema-focused Lumière Film Festival, which has just wrapped its 15th edition.
Highlights this year included German director Wim Wenders receiving its prestigious Lumière Prize, following in the footsteps of the likes of Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Jane Campion and Francis Ford Coppola. As part of the honor, the Paris,...
The double-hatted cinema expert is perhaps more in his element in his home city of Lyon, where he is the director of the Institut Lumière, situated on the site of the former mansion and factory of cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière.
Alongside its late co-founders Bernard Chardère and Bertrand Tavernier, Frémaux has been a driving force behind the expansion of the institute and its activities, including the creation of its classic cinema-focused Lumière Film Festival, which has just wrapped its 15th edition.
Highlights this year included German director Wim Wenders receiving its prestigious Lumière Prize, following in the footsteps of the likes of Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Jane Campion and Francis Ford Coppola. As part of the honor, the Paris,...
- 10/23/2023
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
Wim Wenders and Thierry Frémaux signalled their support on Saturday for the Hollywood actors strike as the industrial action hits its 100th day.
“I understand the actors who all want to profit a little more… rather than there being just a dozen big names who have high salaries… while all the others earn nothing or very little,” Wenders told a press conference at the Lumière Film Festival.
The German director is guest of honor at the 15th edition of the festival, spearheaded by double-hatted Cannes Delegate General Frémaux in his role of director of the Institut Lumière in Lyon, preserving the legacy of cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière.
Frémaux seconded Wenders’s words.
“The universal dimension of this strike is perhaps a bit underestimated… France, which has a reputation for struggle and putting up a fight, can also look with admiration at what is happening in Hollywood for something that touches us all,...
“I understand the actors who all want to profit a little more… rather than there being just a dozen big names who have high salaries… while all the others earn nothing or very little,” Wenders told a press conference at the Lumière Film Festival.
The German director is guest of honor at the 15th edition of the festival, spearheaded by double-hatted Cannes Delegate General Frémaux in his role of director of the Institut Lumière in Lyon, preserving the legacy of cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière.
Frémaux seconded Wenders’s words.
“The universal dimension of this strike is perhaps a bit underestimated… France, which has a reputation for struggle and putting up a fight, can also look with admiration at what is happening in Hollywood for something that touches us all,...
- 10/21/2023
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
Ever since audiences—at least according to myth—ran screaming from the premiere screening of Auguste and Louis Lumière’s 1895 short black-and-white silent documentary Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, the histories of filmgoing and horror have been inextricably intertwined. Through the decades—and subsequent crazes for color and sound, stereoscopy and anamorphosis—since that train threatened to barrel into the front row, there’s never been a time when audiences didn’t clamor for the palpating fingers of fear. Horror films remain perennially popular, despite periodic (and always exaggerated) rumors of their demise, even in the face of steadily declining ticket sales and desperately shifting models of distribution.
Into the new millennium, horror films have retained their power to shock and outrage by continuing to plumb our deepest primordial terrors, to incarnate our sickest, most socially unpalatable fantasies. They are, in what amounts to a particularly delicious irony,...
Into the new millennium, horror films have retained their power to shock and outrage by continuing to plumb our deepest primordial terrors, to incarnate our sickest, most socially unpalatable fantasies. They are, in what amounts to a particularly delicious irony,...
- 10/17/2023
- by Slant Staff
- Slant Magazine
No book could ever fully capture the beautiful, ugly, inexplicable madness that is the Cannes Film Festival — but that hasn’t stopped a handful from trying. Here are THR’s executive editor (awards) and resident film-book bibliophile’s picks for the five best.
1. Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook, by Roger Ebert (1987)
This thin travelogue by the Chicago Sun-Times’ longtime film critic, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and died in 2013, chronicles his experience covering the fest’s 1987 edition, having previously attended many times before. It breezily profiles true festival characters like the publicist Renee Furst, the schlock showman Menahem Golan and the gambler Billy “Silver Dollar” Baxter — all now gone — and charmingly illustrates how much some things have changed (journalists no longer file reports by telex when they can get around to it, but rather post multiple online dispatches daily) and others have not (the jetlag and lack of sleep,...
1. Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook, by Roger Ebert (1987)
This thin travelogue by the Chicago Sun-Times’ longtime film critic, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and died in 2013, chronicles his experience covering the fest’s 1987 edition, having previously attended many times before. It breezily profiles true festival characters like the publicist Renee Furst, the schlock showman Menahem Golan and the gambler Billy “Silver Dollar” Baxter — all now gone — and charmingly illustrates how much some things have changed (journalists no longer file reports by telex when they can get around to it, but rather post multiple online dispatches daily) and others have not (the jetlag and lack of sleep,...
- 5/19/2023
- by Scott Feinberg
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Actress Monica Bellucci and Tim Burton, the director of ‘Edward Scissorhands’ seem to be dating, and have been for months under the radar.
The Italian actress, 58, and the 64-year-old film mogul first met 16 years ago, but have been claimed to have started secretly dating four months ago, reports Mirror.co.uk.
It has been said that the pair decided to make their relationship official around the time of the Lumiere Film Festival in Lyon this October, when Monica presented Tim with the Lumiere lifetime achievement award on stage.
As per Mirror.co.uk, after Monica handed over the prize to her reported beau, Tim said during his speech: “All my life put together, I have never felt so much love as tonight. Welcome to the best funeral I ever had!”
The couple were also reportedly spotted together watching the reproduction of Silent Documentary Film, which was directed in 1895 by the late French filmmaker Louis Lumiere.
The Italian actress, 58, and the 64-year-old film mogul first met 16 years ago, but have been claimed to have started secretly dating four months ago, reports Mirror.co.uk.
It has been said that the pair decided to make their relationship official around the time of the Lumiere Film Festival in Lyon this October, when Monica presented Tim with the Lumiere lifetime achievement award on stage.
As per Mirror.co.uk, after Monica handed over the prize to her reported beau, Tim said during his speech: “All my life put together, I have never felt so much love as tonight. Welcome to the best funeral I ever had!”
The couple were also reportedly spotted together watching the reproduction of Silent Documentary Film, which was directed in 1895 by the late French filmmaker Louis Lumiere.
- 2/23/2023
- by News Bureau
- GlamSham
It looks like Hollywood has a hot new couple.
According to The Daily Mail, actress Monica Bellucci and director Tim Burton have been dating in secret for the last four months.
Read More: Aubrey Plaza Teases Family-Friendly Directorial Debut: ‘I’m Trying To Fill The Female Tim Burton Slot’
Though the couple first met nearly two decades ago, their romance was reportedly sparked after seeing each other again at the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon last October.
At the festival, Bellucci presented Burton with Lumiere lifetime achievement award for his work as a director and producer.
“All my life put together, I have never felt so much love as tonight. Welcome to the best funeral I ever had!” Burton said onstage at the time.
He and Bellucci were later seen together at the festival, heading in to a screening of a reproduction of a 1895 silent film by Louis Lumière.
Read...
According to The Daily Mail, actress Monica Bellucci and director Tim Burton have been dating in secret for the last four months.
Read More: Aubrey Plaza Teases Family-Friendly Directorial Debut: ‘I’m Trying To Fill The Female Tim Burton Slot’
Though the couple first met nearly two decades ago, their romance was reportedly sparked after seeing each other again at the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon last October.
At the festival, Bellucci presented Burton with Lumiere lifetime achievement award for his work as a director and producer.
“All my life put together, I have never felt so much love as tonight. Welcome to the best funeral I ever had!” Burton said onstage at the time.
He and Bellucci were later seen together at the festival, heading in to a screening of a reproduction of a 1895 silent film by Louis Lumière.
Read...
- 2/22/2023
- by Corey Atad
- ET Canada
Long-time London resident Tim Burton has joked that the current political chaos in the U.K. might prompt him to leave the country.
The U.S. filmmaker was talking at a press conference on Saturday at the Lumière Festival in Lyon where he received its prestigious Prix Lumière in front of a wildly enthusiastic local crowd on Friday night.
Talking about his 1996 film Mars Attacks!, Burton explained the film had been born out of his confusion about what was going on in the U.S. in the early 1990s.
“It was a strange period of my life where I was very confused about America at the time. It seemed very contradictory, what was real and wasn’t real,” he said. “That was my way of exploring it and dealing with it, looking at the weirdness and the contradictions of things in the guise of a disaster, science fiction movie.”
This...
The U.S. filmmaker was talking at a press conference on Saturday at the Lumière Festival in Lyon where he received its prestigious Prix Lumière in front of a wildly enthusiastic local crowd on Friday night.
Talking about his 1996 film Mars Attacks!, Burton explained the film had been born out of his confusion about what was going on in the U.S. in the early 1990s.
“It was a strange period of my life where I was very confused about America at the time. It seemed very contradictory, what was real and wasn’t real,” he said. “That was my way of exploring it and dealing with it, looking at the weirdness and the contradictions of things in the guise of a disaster, science fiction movie.”
This...
- 10/22/2022
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
Burton will attend the festival in-person to receive his award.
US filmmaker Tim Burton will receive the lifetime achievement award at the 14th Lumiere Film Festival (October 15 - 23) in Lyon, France.
The auteur, who will be at the festival to recieve his award on October 21, is known for Gothic horror films Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Cannes’ director Thierry Fremaux set up the festival in 2009, through his role as head of Lyon’s Institut Lumiere. The event is held in Lyon, on the former home of cinema-pioneering brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere.
The...
US filmmaker Tim Burton will receive the lifetime achievement award at the 14th Lumiere Film Festival (October 15 - 23) in Lyon, France.
The auteur, who will be at the festival to recieve his award on October 21, is known for Gothic horror films Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Cannes’ director Thierry Fremaux set up the festival in 2009, through his role as head of Lyon’s Institut Lumiere. The event is held in Lyon, on the former home of cinema-pioneering brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere.
The...
- 7/20/2022
- by Ellie Calnan
- ScreenDaily
US filmmaker Tim Burton will be feted with France’s prestigious Lumière Award at the 14th edition of the classic film-focused Lumière Festival in Lyon, running October 15-23.
He follows in the footsteps of previous honorees Jane Campion (2021), Francis Ford Coppola (2019), Wong Kar-wai (2017), Catherine Deneuve (2016), Pedro Almodóvar and Quentin Tarantino (2013).
“This fall, Lumière 2022 will offer a dive into a wonderland – somewhere between Americana and its legends, Victorian England, futuristic megalopolises and neighbourhoods of suburbia – in the company of the heroes, monsters, monstrous heroes or heroic monsters of Tim Burton’s world,” said the festival in a release.
The festival paid tribute to the many highlights of Burton’s 40-year filmmaking career from early hits Beetlejuice (1988) and Edward Scissorhands (1990), to quirky works playing with mainstream sci-fi comedy and musical genres such as Mars Attacks! (1996), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Dark Shadows (2012), Sleepy Hollow (1999), and major box office...
He follows in the footsteps of previous honorees Jane Campion (2021), Francis Ford Coppola (2019), Wong Kar-wai (2017), Catherine Deneuve (2016), Pedro Almodóvar and Quentin Tarantino (2013).
“This fall, Lumière 2022 will offer a dive into a wonderland – somewhere between Americana and its legends, Victorian England, futuristic megalopolises and neighbourhoods of suburbia – in the company of the heroes, monsters, monstrous heroes or heroic monsters of Tim Burton’s world,” said the festival in a release.
The festival paid tribute to the many highlights of Burton’s 40-year filmmaking career from early hits Beetlejuice (1988) and Edward Scissorhands (1990), to quirky works playing with mainstream sci-fi comedy and musical genres such as Mars Attacks! (1996), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Dark Shadows (2012), Sleepy Hollow (1999), and major box office...
- 7/20/2022
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
Frémaux makes his first trip to Egypt and Saudi Arabia after last visiting the Middle East in 2016.
Cannes Film Festival delegate general Thierry Frémaux is hitting the Arab film festival circuit in December with trips to the Cairo International Film Festival (Ciff) and the inaugural edition of Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea International Film Festival (Rsiff).
It will be Frémaux’s first trip to either Egypt or Saudi Arabia. He was last in the Middle East in an official capacity in 2016 when he attended the Dubai International Film Festival with Lumière! The Adventure Of Cinema Begins.
Frémaux is due to...
Cannes Film Festival delegate general Thierry Frémaux is hitting the Arab film festival circuit in December with trips to the Cairo International Film Festival (Ciff) and the inaugural edition of Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea International Film Festival (Rsiff).
It will be Frémaux’s first trip to either Egypt or Saudi Arabia. He was last in the Middle East in an official capacity in 2016 when he attended the Dubai International Film Festival with Lumière! The Adventure Of Cinema Begins.
Frémaux is due to...
- 11/17/2021
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- ScreenDaily
The Visual Effects Society has set Oscar-winning filmmaker James Cameron and CG pioneer Gary Demos (The Last Starfighter) as Honorary Members, while adding new fellows and Hall of Fame inductees, all of whom will be celebrated at a special event this fall.
Fellows, who will be bestowed with the post-nominal letters “Ves,” include VFX veterans Brooke Breton, Mike Chambers, Van Ling and Nancy St. John.
The 2021 class of Ves Hall of Fame honorees includes VFX supervisor and Dp and special effects icon Roy Field, special effects supervisor and Dp John P. Fulton, A.S.C. (The Ten Commandments), VFX supervisor and designer Phil Kellison, pioneering filmmakers Auguste and Louis Lumière (The Arrival of a Train), and animator, composer and inventor John Whitney,...
Fellows, who will be bestowed with the post-nominal letters “Ves,” include VFX veterans Brooke Breton, Mike Chambers, Van Ling and Nancy St. John.
The 2021 class of Ves Hall of Fame honorees includes VFX supervisor and Dp and special effects icon Roy Field, special effects supervisor and Dp John P. Fulton, A.S.C. (The Ten Commandments), VFX supervisor and designer Phil Kellison, pioneering filmmakers Auguste and Louis Lumière (The Arrival of a Train), and animator, composer and inventor John Whitney,...
- 9/29/2021
- by Matt Grobar
- Deadline Film + TV
Nathalie Trafford’s Paraiso Production Diffusion and Jérôme Vidal’s Noodles from France and Roberto Butragueño’s Elamedia and Luis Miñarro’s Eddie Saeta from Spain have teamed to co-produce Javier Rebollo’s “Dans la chambre du Sultan.”
A multi-prized Spanish film director, Rebollo won San Sebastian’s best director with “La mujer sin piano” (The Woman Without a Piano) and a Fipresci prize with “El muerto y ser feliz” (“The Dead Man and Being Happy”) at the festival’s 2009 and 2012 editions.
“Dans la chambre du Sultan” (Close to the Sultan) turns on Gabriel Veyre (pictured), the most gifted of Auguste and Louis Lumière’s camera operators who traveled to Morocco for three months in 1900, hired by the Sultan Moulay Abd el-Aziz to initiate him into the mysteries of cinema. He remained for his lifetime.
Starring Vincent Macaigne (Louis Garrel’s “Two Friends”), “Dans la chambre”’s cast will also...
A multi-prized Spanish film director, Rebollo won San Sebastian’s best director with “La mujer sin piano” (The Woman Without a Piano) and a Fipresci prize with “El muerto y ser feliz” (“The Dead Man and Being Happy”) at the festival’s 2009 and 2012 editions.
“Dans la chambre du Sultan” (Close to the Sultan) turns on Gabriel Veyre (pictured), the most gifted of Auguste and Louis Lumière’s camera operators who traveled to Morocco for three months in 1900, hired by the Sultan Moulay Abd el-Aziz to initiate him into the mysteries of cinema. He remained for his lifetime.
Starring Vincent Macaigne (Louis Garrel’s “Two Friends”), “Dans la chambre”’s cast will also...
- 9/21/2021
- by Emilio Mayorga
- Variety Film + TV
The director was a prolific and legendary figure, making films in a dizzying range of genres from crime to sci-fi, satire to jazz
If any film-maker was a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood icon of French cinema, it was Bertrand Tavernier, the legendary, prolific director and a proud son of Lyon – which was itself arguably the historical epicentre of cinema, as the city where Auguste and Louis Lumière set up business. In 2017, I went to the Lumière festival in that city, and was briefly introduced to him there. Tavernier’s presence was indispensable: I have a photograph of a raucous dinner hosted by Thierry Frémaux with Benicio del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón, and Tavernier is an impish, grinning figure to be glimpsed in the mirror, loved by everyone there, a sprightly tutelary deity.
Related: Bertrand Tavernier, veteran French director of Round Midnight, dies aged 79...
If any film-maker was a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood icon of French cinema, it was Bertrand Tavernier, the legendary, prolific director and a proud son of Lyon – which was itself arguably the historical epicentre of cinema, as the city where Auguste and Louis Lumière set up business. In 2017, I went to the Lumière festival in that city, and was briefly introduced to him there. Tavernier’s presence was indispensable: I have a photograph of a raucous dinner hosted by Thierry Frémaux with Benicio del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón, and Tavernier is an impish, grinning figure to be glimpsed in the mirror, loved by everyone there, a sprightly tutelary deity.
Related: Bertrand Tavernier, veteran French director of Round Midnight, dies aged 79...
- 3/25/2021
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
“Cinema still exists, it never left us,” declare Thierry Frémaux, Bertrand Tavernier in open letter
Cannes delegate general and Lumière Institute chief Frémaux evokes need for “a fighting spirit”.
Cannes Film Festival delegate general Thierry Frémaux, who is also director of the Lumière Institute in Lyon, and Bertrand Tavernier, the institute’s long-time president, have published an open letter on the future of cinema.
Coming in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and to mark the reopening of the institute’s onsite theatre, the pair’s letter heralded green shoots of recovery for France’s distribution and exhibition sector as the French population returns to work and school after the long summer break, for the traditional September rentrée.
Cannes Film Festival delegate general Thierry Frémaux, who is also director of the Lumière Institute in Lyon, and Bertrand Tavernier, the institute’s long-time president, have published an open letter on the future of cinema.
Coming in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and to mark the reopening of the institute’s onsite theatre, the pair’s letter heralded green shoots of recovery for France’s distribution and exhibition sector as the French population returns to work and school after the long summer break, for the traditional September rentrée.
- 8/30/2020
- by 1100388¦Melanie Goodfellow¦69¦
- ScreenDaily
Past recipients include Francis Ford Coppola, Jane Fonda, Wong Kar-wai, Catherine Deneuve, Martin Scorsese and Pedro Almodóvar.
France’s Lumière Institute will fete Belgian directorial duo Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne with its prestigious Lumière Award at the 12th edition of its annual cinema heritage festival, running October 10-18 this year.
Both directors are expected to attend the festival, which takes place at the institute’s headquarters in Lyon, constructed on the sites of the factory and home of cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière.
The pair immortalised the factory on the big screen in their 1895 short film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.
France’s Lumière Institute will fete Belgian directorial duo Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne with its prestigious Lumière Award at the 12th edition of its annual cinema heritage festival, running October 10-18 this year.
Both directors are expected to attend the festival, which takes place at the institute’s headquarters in Lyon, constructed on the sites of the factory and home of cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière.
The pair immortalised the factory on the big screen in their 1895 short film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.
- 7/16/2020
- by 1100388¦Melanie Goodfellow¦69¦
- ScreenDaily
Created by Cannes chief Thierry Fremaux and filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier, the Lumiere Festival is due to take place in Lyon from October 10-18. Largely a retrospective event with hundreds of restored films, thematic strands and uncovered gems, it will also feature some titles officially selected for the Cannes Classics 2020 edition which was unable to be held owing to the coronavirus crisis. Today, the Lumière Fest announced that this year’s recipients of the honorary Prix Lumière are Belgian auteurs Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.
The brothers are among the winningest filmmakers at Cannes, having taken the Palme d’Or twice (for Rosetta in 1999 and The Child in 2005), as well as prizes for screenwriting and directing, among others. They are known for naturalistic films that tackle social issues and shine a light on the young generation. The Lumière festival calls their work, “human, engaged… and crying out for truth.”
Other notable credits include La Promesse,...
The brothers are among the winningest filmmakers at Cannes, having taken the Palme d’Or twice (for Rosetta in 1999 and The Child in 2005), as well as prizes for screenwriting and directing, among others. They are known for naturalistic films that tackle social issues and shine a light on the young generation. The Lumière festival calls their work, “human, engaged… and crying out for truth.”
Other notable credits include La Promesse,...
- 7/16/2020
- by Nancy Tartaglione
- Deadline Film + TV
A Straub-Huillet Companion is a series of short essays on the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, subject of a Mubi retrospective. Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub's Antigone (1992) is showing on Mubi from May 5– June 4, 2020."What seems interesting to me is that the Lumière approach, though it seeks to simply reproduce reality, nevertheless leaves the door open to the wildest imagination. I find that there is more fantasy in certain images [of theirs] than in certain paintings that claim to be works of fantasy. I find that Lumière's images somehow remind me of what Le Douanier Rousseau represents in painting. That is, each man shares a sincere desire to copy reality, without adding or removing anything, but in fact the end result is the creation of a world. It is a world that exists in reality, but which also exists, with perhaps even greater power, in the imagination of Le Douanier...
- 5/5/2020
- MUBI
It’s the understatement of the century to say that life for moviegoers — and everyone, really — was different in 1895. This was the year that, on March 22, 125 years ago today, Auguste and Louis Lumière debuted “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory,” a short film widely regarded as the invention of movies for mass audiences. The premiere was held at a private screening for an audience of 10. Watch the film below.
The film was shot in 35mm, with the aspect ratio of 1.33.1 at 16 frames per second. The Lumière brothers were among the first filmmakers in world history, pioneering cinematic technology as well as establishing the common grammar of film. The brothers went on to work on hundreds of films in less than a decade. The Lumières also created the cinematograph, a motion-picture film camera that serves as both a projector and a printer. Developed in Lyon, this technology allowed multiple moviegoers to experience...
The film was shot in 35mm, with the aspect ratio of 1.33.1 at 16 frames per second. The Lumière brothers were among the first filmmakers in world history, pioneering cinematic technology as well as establishing the common grammar of film. The brothers went on to work on hundreds of films in less than a decade. The Lumières also created the cinematograph, a motion-picture film camera that serves as both a projector and a printer. Developed in Lyon, this technology allowed multiple moviegoers to experience...
- 3/22/2020
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
Auguste and Louis Lumière were two of the pioneers of filmmaking, but you’ve never seen a Lumière brother film like this before. YouTube user Denis Shiryaev is going viral after uploading a fan-made restoration of the Lumière brothers’ 1885 short film “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat,” presented in 4K and at 60 frames per second. The restoration brings one of the most historic short films of the 19th century firmly into the 21st. The image is so clear it almost makes it appear as if the Lumière brothers shot “Arrival of a Train” on digital. The fan-made restoration was uploaded to YouTube on February 2 and has already amassed over 1.1 million views and counting in less than a week.
“Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat” was shot in 1895 but did not publicly screen for the first time until January 1896. The silent short film runs 50 seconds and depicts a train...
“Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat” was shot in 1895 but did not publicly screen for the first time until January 1896. The silent short film runs 50 seconds and depicts a train...
- 2/5/2020
- by Zack Sharf
- Indiewire
Wild Bunch TV, 68productions team on new production with agent Jeff Berg.
French director Jean-Jacques Annaud is set to direct an international drama series about pioneer filmmaker Alice Guy, the first woman to direct a fiction film in the late 1890s who then went on to set up one of the first studios in the Us.
Paris-based Wild Bunch TV and 68Productions and talent agent Jeff Berg are partnering on the series, adapted from the 2015 autobiography Alice Guy by French writer Emmanuelle Gaume.
It will be the second foray into TV for Wolf Totem and The Name Of The Rose...
French director Jean-Jacques Annaud is set to direct an international drama series about pioneer filmmaker Alice Guy, the first woman to direct a fiction film in the late 1890s who then went on to set up one of the first studios in the Us.
Paris-based Wild Bunch TV and 68Productions and talent agent Jeff Berg are partnering on the series, adapted from the 2015 autobiography Alice Guy by French writer Emmanuelle Gaume.
It will be the second foray into TV for Wolf Totem and The Name Of The Rose...
- 2/4/2020
- by 1100388¦Melanie Goodfellow¦0¦
- ScreenDaily
Wild Bunch TV, 68productions team on new production with agent Jeff Berg.
French director Jean-Jacques Annaud is set to direct an international drama series about pioneer filmmaker Alice Guy, the first woman to direct a fiction film in the late1890s who then went to set up one of the first studios in the Us.
Paris-based Wild Bunch TV and 68Productions and talent agent Jeff Berg are partnering on the series, adapted from the 2015 autobiography Alice Guy by French writer Emmanuelle Gaume.
It will the second foray into TV for Wolf Totem and The Name Of The Rose director Annaud...
French director Jean-Jacques Annaud is set to direct an international drama series about pioneer filmmaker Alice Guy, the first woman to direct a fiction film in the late1890s who then went to set up one of the first studios in the Us.
Paris-based Wild Bunch TV and 68Productions and talent agent Jeff Berg are partnering on the series, adapted from the 2015 autobiography Alice Guy by French writer Emmanuelle Gaume.
It will the second foray into TV for Wolf Totem and The Name Of The Rose director Annaud...
- 2/4/2020
- by 1100388¦Melanie Goodfellow¦0¦
- ScreenDaily
Slate also features directorial duo Gustave Kervern and Benoit Delépine’s comedy drama Delete History.
Wild Bunch has boarded sales on Just Philippot’s fantasy drama The Swarm about a woman who develops an obsessional bond with grasshoppers she is breeding as a high-protein crop.
The film, produced by Capricci and Manuel Chiche’s The Jokers Films, is a first feature for Philippot.
The emerging French director participated in Sundance’s international shorts competition earlier this year with his Canal+ acquired short film Acide, about a disturbing acidic cloud which passes over a country spreading panic.
In The Swarm, Suliane Brahim...
Wild Bunch has boarded sales on Just Philippot’s fantasy drama The Swarm about a woman who develops an obsessional bond with grasshoppers she is breeding as a high-protein crop.
The film, produced by Capricci and Manuel Chiche’s The Jokers Films, is a first feature for Philippot.
The emerging French director participated in Sundance’s international shorts competition earlier this year with his Canal+ acquired short film Acide, about a disturbing acidic cloud which passes over a country spreading panic.
In The Swarm, Suliane Brahim...
- 10/30/2019
- by 1100380¦Melanie Goodfellow¦0¦
- ScreenDaily
Celebrated French cinematographer Pierre Lhomme has passed away aged 89.
The veteran DoP was well known for a string of French classics including Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army Of Shadows (1969), Jean Eustache’s The Mother And The Whore (1973), Bruno Nuytten’s Camille Claudelle (1988) and Gerard Depardieu pic Cyrano De Bergerac (1990).
Lhomme’s career as a cinematographer spanned five decades, beginning in 1953. He was nominated for seven Cesar Awards, winning two for Cyrano De Bergerac and Camille Claudelle. The former also saw him garner a BAFTA win and a technical grand prize at Cannes.
Lhomme also worked with directors Chris Marker, Robert Bresson, Patrice Chéreauon and on several Merchant-Ivory features, including the James Ivory-directed Quartet, Maurice, Jefferson In Paris and Le Divorce, which was his last credit in 2003.
According to the Lumiere Institute in France, Lhomme died yesterday.
Grande tristesse. Pierre Lhomme s’est éteint hier à 89 ans. Il était le cinema français. Formé à Louis Lumière, engagé dans les combats de son temps et de son métier, il a été aussi aux côtés du @festlumiere dès 2009. @afcinema_com pic.twitter.com/5lULCMmIzi
— Institut Lumière (@InstitutLumiere) July 5, 2019...
The veteran DoP was well known for a string of French classics including Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army Of Shadows (1969), Jean Eustache’s The Mother And The Whore (1973), Bruno Nuytten’s Camille Claudelle (1988) and Gerard Depardieu pic Cyrano De Bergerac (1990).
Lhomme’s career as a cinematographer spanned five decades, beginning in 1953. He was nominated for seven Cesar Awards, winning two for Cyrano De Bergerac and Camille Claudelle. The former also saw him garner a BAFTA win and a technical grand prize at Cannes.
Lhomme also worked with directors Chris Marker, Robert Bresson, Patrice Chéreauon and on several Merchant-Ivory features, including the James Ivory-directed Quartet, Maurice, Jefferson In Paris and Le Divorce, which was his last credit in 2003.
According to the Lumiere Institute in France, Lhomme died yesterday.
Grande tristesse. Pierre Lhomme s’est éteint hier à 89 ans. Il était le cinema français. Formé à Louis Lumière, engagé dans les combats de son temps et de son métier, il a été aussi aux côtés du @festlumiere dès 2009. @afcinema_com pic.twitter.com/5lULCMmIzi
— Institut Lumière (@InstitutLumiere) July 5, 2019...
- 7/5/2019
- by Andreas Wiseman
- Deadline Film + TV
Slate also includes four new festival title acquisitions and five previously announced Palme d’Or contenders.
Wild Bunch will launch sales on eight new titles at Cannes this year including Sylvie Verheyde’s Madame Claude about an infamous French brothel owner and Lou Ye’s upcoming black and white thriller Saturday Fiction.
The slate also features two recent acquisitions out of the Official Selection as well as two new Cannes Critics’ Week films alongside the five previously announced Palme d’Or contenders.
Verheyde’s Madame Claude stars Karole Rocher as the real-life, late Paris brothel owner whose clients allegedly included John F.
Wild Bunch will launch sales on eight new titles at Cannes this year including Sylvie Verheyde’s Madame Claude about an infamous French brothel owner and Lou Ye’s upcoming black and white thriller Saturday Fiction.
The slate also features two recent acquisitions out of the Official Selection as well as two new Cannes Critics’ Week films alongside the five previously announced Palme d’Or contenders.
Verheyde’s Madame Claude stars Karole Rocher as the real-life, late Paris brothel owner whose clients allegedly included John F.
- 5/9/2019
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- ScreenDaily
Slate also includes four new festival title acquisitions and five previously announced Palme d’Or contenders.
Wild Bunch will launch sales on eight new titles at Cannes this year including Sylvie Verheyde’s Madame Claude about an infamous French brothel owner and Lou Ye’s upcoming black and white thriller Saturday Fiction.
The slate also features two recent acquisitions out of the Official Selection as well as two new Cannes Critics’ Week films alongside the five previously announced Palme d’Or contenders.
Verheyde’s Madame Claude stars Karole Rocher as the real-life, late Paris brothel owner whose clients allegedly included John F.
Wild Bunch will launch sales on eight new titles at Cannes this year including Sylvie Verheyde’s Madame Claude about an infamous French brothel owner and Lou Ye’s upcoming black and white thriller Saturday Fiction.
The slate also features two recent acquisitions out of the Official Selection as well as two new Cannes Critics’ Week films alongside the five previously announced Palme d’Or contenders.
Verheyde’s Madame Claude stars Karole Rocher as the real-life, late Paris brothel owner whose clients allegedly included John F.
- 5/9/2019
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- ScreenDaily
Jane Fonda and Alexander Payne will appear at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Film Restoration Summit.
The March 9 event at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles is being held in partnership with the Film Foundation and Institut Lumière. It will begin with a presentation by Institut Lumiere director Thierry Frémaux on the Lumière brothers’ restoration project. The HFPA announced in October that it was supporting the effort, which is aimed at restoring 300 short films by Auguste and Louis Lumière, with a $200,000 donation.
Fonda and Payne will be part of a panel with UCLA Film & Television Archive director Jan-Christopher Horak and Grover Crisp, Sony Pictures Entertainment’s executive VP of film restoration and digital mastery. The panel will be moderated by IndieCollect president Sandra Schulberg, and focus on the cultural importance of preserving the art of cinema and what new generations of filmmakers can learn through the experience of watching restored classics.
The March 9 event at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles is being held in partnership with the Film Foundation and Institut Lumière. It will begin with a presentation by Institut Lumiere director Thierry Frémaux on the Lumière brothers’ restoration project. The HFPA announced in October that it was supporting the effort, which is aimed at restoring 300 short films by Auguste and Louis Lumière, with a $200,000 donation.
Fonda and Payne will be part of a panel with UCLA Film & Television Archive director Jan-Christopher Horak and Grover Crisp, Sony Pictures Entertainment’s executive VP of film restoration and digital mastery. The panel will be moderated by IndieCollect president Sandra Schulberg, and focus on the cultural importance of preserving the art of cinema and what new generations of filmmakers can learn through the experience of watching restored classics.
- 2/26/2019
- by Dave McNary
- Variety Film + TV
Lyon, France — The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) is partnering with the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon to help restore 300 short films by brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière. In collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna and the Lumière Foundation, the donation will fund the second phase of restoration.
“The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has long been a supporter of film restoration with the goal of preserving the rich history of the world’s cinematic heritage,” said HFPA president Meher Tatna. “We’re proud to partner with the Lumière Foundation in Lyon, one of the world’s premiere showcases of classic and restored films.”
The Institut Lumière said the collaboration represented a renewed commitment to the preservation of film threatened by decay and deterioration.
“Our organizations share similar missions,” said Institut Lumière director Thierry Frémaux. “They’re to preserve the culture and history of motion pictures, foster cultural exchanges and understandings through...
“The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has long been a supporter of film restoration with the goal of preserving the rich history of the world’s cinematic heritage,” said HFPA president Meher Tatna. “We’re proud to partner with the Lumière Foundation in Lyon, one of the world’s premiere showcases of classic and restored films.”
The Institut Lumière said the collaboration represented a renewed commitment to the preservation of film threatened by decay and deterioration.
“Our organizations share similar missions,” said Institut Lumière director Thierry Frémaux. “They’re to preserve the culture and history of motion pictures, foster cultural exchanges and understandings through...
- 10/15/2018
- by Ed Meza
- Variety Film + TV
Exclusive: Paris-based company reshuffles sales team as Carole Baraton steps down as head of sales.
Wild Bunch will launch sales on new films by Jean-Luc Godard, Christian Carion, Michel Ocelot, Raymond Depardon as well as a feel-good, Senegal-set drama starring Omar Sy at Unifrance’s upcoming Rendez-vous with French Cinema in Paris (Jan 12-16).
The event will also mark the first outing for the company’s reconfigured sales team following Carole Baraton’s decision to step down as head of sales to set-up her own company.
Baraton’s long-time territories the Us, France and the UK will be carved up between the sales team, now consisting of Silvia Simonutti, Emilie Serres, Olivier Barbier, recent hire Fanny Beauville and Esther Devos for festivals.
Notably, Beauville will co-handle Canada and the Us in partnership with La’s Creative Artist Agency (CAA), working closely with the agency’s film finance and sales group co-chief Roeg Sutherland and his team.
Bilingual...
Wild Bunch will launch sales on new films by Jean-Luc Godard, Christian Carion, Michel Ocelot, Raymond Depardon as well as a feel-good, Senegal-set drama starring Omar Sy at Unifrance’s upcoming Rendez-vous with French Cinema in Paris (Jan 12-16).
The event will also mark the first outing for the company’s reconfigured sales team following Carole Baraton’s decision to step down as head of sales to set-up her own company.
Baraton’s long-time territories the Us, France and the UK will be carved up between the sales team, now consisting of Silvia Simonutti, Emilie Serres, Olivier Barbier, recent hire Fanny Beauville and Esther Devos for festivals.
Notably, Beauville will co-handle Canada and the Us in partnership with La’s Creative Artist Agency (CAA), working closely with the agency’s film finance and sales group co-chief Roeg Sutherland and his team.
Bilingual...
- 12/27/2016
- ScreenDaily
Cannes Film Festival and Institut Lumière chief to introduce the Gulf to work of cinema pioneers at Diff.
Double-hatted Cannes Film Festival chief Thierry Frémaux will be heading to the Dubai International Film Festival (Diff, Dec 7-14) this December to present Lumière! Inventing Cinema.
The 4K feature is a compilation of restored films made by cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière between 1895 and 1905.
Frémaux, who divides his time between running Cannes and the Institut Lumière in Lyon, devoted to the work of the Lumière brothers and film heritage in general, said he was excited to be bringing the work to Dubai:
“The showcase enables us to rediscover and celebrate Auguste and Louis Lumiére, a pair of filmmakers who are responsible for film as we know it, whose pioneering moving image snapshots of life at the end of the 19th century paved the way for the popularisation of the medium and its evolution into an art form.”
It...
Double-hatted Cannes Film Festival chief Thierry Frémaux will be heading to the Dubai International Film Festival (Diff, Dec 7-14) this December to present Lumière! Inventing Cinema.
The 4K feature is a compilation of restored films made by cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière between 1895 and 1905.
Frémaux, who divides his time between running Cannes and the Institut Lumière in Lyon, devoted to the work of the Lumière brothers and film heritage in general, said he was excited to be bringing the work to Dubai:
“The showcase enables us to rediscover and celebrate Auguste and Louis Lumiére, a pair of filmmakers who are responsible for film as we know it, whose pioneering moving image snapshots of life at the end of the 19th century paved the way for the popularisation of the medium and its evolution into an art form.”
It...
- 11/9/2016
- ScreenDaily
Cannes head will be live-narrating his archive film Lumière! at the festival.
Cannes Film Festival chief Thierry Frémaux was a guest of the Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff) this weekend but his visit was not connected to his role as the head of the biggest and most glamorous festival in the world.
Double-hatted Frémaux was in town instead as managing director of France’s Institut Lumière in Lyon, devoted to the work of cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière and film heritage in general, which he oversees when not preparing Cannes.
He flew into Toronto do a live narration of his film Lumière! pulling together some 100 short films shot by the Lumière brothers from 1895 to 1905, which are rarely shown on the big screen today.
He spearheaded the film, producing alongside compatriot director Bertrand Tavernier (who is president of the Institut Lumière), to mark the 120th anniversary of cinema in France in 2015.
“Louis Lumière and his operators shot nearly...
Cannes Film Festival chief Thierry Frémaux was a guest of the Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff) this weekend but his visit was not connected to his role as the head of the biggest and most glamorous festival in the world.
Double-hatted Frémaux was in town instead as managing director of France’s Institut Lumière in Lyon, devoted to the work of cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière and film heritage in general, which he oversees when not preparing Cannes.
He flew into Toronto do a live narration of his film Lumière! pulling together some 100 short films shot by the Lumière brothers from 1895 to 1905, which are rarely shown on the big screen today.
He spearheaded the film, producing alongside compatriot director Bertrand Tavernier (who is president of the Institut Lumière), to mark the 120th anniversary of cinema in France in 2015.
“Louis Lumière and his operators shot nearly...
- 9/11/2016
- ScreenDaily
As shown by a new restoration of some of the 1,400 shorts that the pioneers of early cinema filmed, the Lumières were true artists as well as inventors
On strips of celluloid 17 metres long and 35mm wide, the Lumière brothers made some of the world’s first and most famous films. But while many cinephiles could tell you that the pioneering inventors of the Cinématographe filmed trains entering stations and workers leaving factories, the true scope of their work is often overlooked. The Lumières were responsible not just for a successful invention but a huge number of films, which experimented with techniques that were necessarily new and roamed across a rapidly changing landscape, from their factory in Lyon and across Europe to America and east Asia.
Auguste and Louis Lumière were photographers by trade, who were inspired to attempt moving pictures after seeing a demonstration of Edison’s Kinetoscope, a “peephole...
On strips of celluloid 17 metres long and 35mm wide, the Lumière brothers made some of the world’s first and most famous films. But while many cinephiles could tell you that the pioneering inventors of the Cinématographe filmed trains entering stations and workers leaving factories, the true scope of their work is often overlooked. The Lumières were responsible not just for a successful invention but a huge number of films, which experimented with techniques that were necessarily new and roamed across a rapidly changing landscape, from their factory in Lyon and across Europe to America and east Asia.
Auguste and Louis Lumière were photographers by trade, who were inspired to attempt moving pictures after seeing a demonstration of Edison’s Kinetoscope, a “peephole...
- 5/23/2016
- by Pamela Hutchinson
- The Guardian - Film News
Cannes chief posts statement on festival website in response to rumours he was on the verge of quitting.Scroll down for full statement
Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux has taken the unusual step of posting a statement on the film festival’s official website denying he is on the verge of leaving his post in response to growing rumours that he was considering a tempting job offer from the private sector.
Rumours have been rife in the French media and among industry professionals on the festival circuit - in Rotterdam and Goteborg - that Frémaux was about to step-down as head of the Cannes Film Festival and the Institut Lumière in Lyon after being headhunted by a major French media and entertainment company.
They coincided with the festival’s first announcement of 2016 that Mad Max director George Miller will preside over the jury of the 69th edition (May 11-22) and appear to have stemmed initially from a...
Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux has taken the unusual step of posting a statement on the film festival’s official website denying he is on the verge of leaving his post in response to growing rumours that he was considering a tempting job offer from the private sector.
Rumours have been rife in the French media and among industry professionals on the festival circuit - in Rotterdam and Goteborg - that Frémaux was about to step-down as head of the Cannes Film Festival and the Institut Lumière in Lyon after being headhunted by a major French media and entertainment company.
They coincided with the festival’s first announcement of 2016 that Mad Max director George Miller will preside over the jury of the 69th edition (May 11-22) and appear to have stemmed initially from a...
- 2/7/2016
- ScreenDaily
Cannes chief posts statement on festival website in response to rumours he was on the verge of quitting.
Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux has taken the unusual step of posting a statement on the film festival’s official website denying he is on the verge of leaving his post in response to growing rumours that he was considering a tempting job offer from the private sector.
Rumours have been rife in the French media and among industry professionals on the festival circuit - in Rotterdam and Goteborg - that Frémaux was about to step-down as head of the Cannes Film Festival and the Institut Lumière in Lyon after being headhunted by a major French media and entertainment company.
They coincided with the festival’s first announcement of 2016 that Mad Max director George Miller will preside over the jury of the 69th edition (May 11-22) and appear to have stemmed initially from a short report on Tuesday (Feb 2) on...
Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux has taken the unusual step of posting a statement on the film festival’s official website denying he is on the verge of leaving his post in response to growing rumours that he was considering a tempting job offer from the private sector.
Rumours have been rife in the French media and among industry professionals on the festival circuit - in Rotterdam and Goteborg - that Frémaux was about to step-down as head of the Cannes Film Festival and the Institut Lumière in Lyon after being headhunted by a major French media and entertainment company.
They coincided with the festival’s first announcement of 2016 that Mad Max director George Miller will preside over the jury of the 69th edition (May 11-22) and appear to have stemmed initially from a short report on Tuesday (Feb 2) on...
- 2/7/2016
- ScreenDaily
The box office–dominating “The Force Awakens” is a recent example of filmmaking that speaks to the leaps and bounds we’ve taken with the cinematic experience. From black and white silent films to “Star Wars” on the big screen, the art of movies has evolved over the years. Dec. 28 marked the 120th anniversary of the beginnings of commercial cinema: Auguste and Louis Lumière’s mounting of their first movies in a burst of 10 50-second shorts at the Grand Café in Paris. To commemorate the event, Moon Film crafted a two and a half minute supercut of some of the most iconic movies, including shots from “The Sound of Music,” “Taxi Driver,” “The Matrix,” “Titanic,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” and “Singin’ in the Rain.” The homage, which features 75 films from 75 directors, also includes glimpses at some of our favorite actors. Check it out below to see which movies and performers made the cut!
- 12/30/2015
- backstage.com
Luke McKernan presents a quick guide to a site devoted to Auguste and Louis Lumière, widely considered the world's first filmmakers. Also in today's roundup: A tribute to Chantal Akerman, appreciations of Richard Brooks's In Cold Blood, Kurt Walker's Hit 2 Pass and Gina Telaroli's Here's to the Future!, the Hollywood Reporter's actress roundtable with Cate Blanchett, Jane Fonda, Brie Larson, Jennifer Lawrence, Helen Mirren, Carey Mulligan, Charlotte Rampling and Kate Winslet, interviews with Mark Rappaport, Walter Murch, Terence Davies, Tippi Hedren, László Nemes, Todd Haynes, Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Mathieu Amalric and Gaspar Noé—and more. » - David Hudson...
- 11/19/2015
- Fandor: Keyframe
Luke McKernan presents a quick guide to a site devoted to Auguste and Louis Lumière, widely considered the world's first filmmakers. Also in today's roundup: A tribute to Chantal Akerman, appreciations of Richard Brooks's In Cold Blood, Kurt Walker's Hit 2 Pass and Gina Telaroli's Here's to the Future!, the Hollywood Reporter's actress roundtable with Cate Blanchett, Jane Fonda, Brie Larson, Jennifer Lawrence, Helen Mirren, Carey Mulligan, Charlotte Rampling and Kate Winslet, interviews with Mark Rappaport, Walter Murch, Terence Davies, Tippi Hedren, László Nemes, Todd Haynes, Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Mathieu Amalric and Gaspar Noé—and more. » - David Hudson...
- 11/19/2015
- Keyframe
"Max von Sydow first entered the consciousness of moviegoers as the medieval knight playing chess with Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). For a significant portion of his six decades onscreen, he has been the greatest actor alive." A salute from Terrence Rafferty in the Atlantic. Also in today's roundup: Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin on David Lynch's Lost Highway, Luke McKernan on Auguste Lumière and Louis Lumière, David Kalat on Claude Chabrol, Tony Rayns on Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Eric Hynes on Laurent Bécue-Renard’s Of Men and War, a profile of Donald Sutherland, revisiting David Lean’s Brief Encounter and Doctor Zhivago—and more. » - David Hudson...
- 11/15/2015
- Fandor: Keyframe
"Max von Sydow first entered the consciousness of moviegoers as the medieval knight playing chess with Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). For a significant portion of his six decades onscreen, he has been the greatest actor alive." A salute from Terrence Rafferty in the Atlantic. Also in today's roundup: Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin on David Lynch's Lost Highway, Luke McKernan on Auguste Lumière and Louis Lumière, David Kalat on Claude Chabrol, Tony Rayns on Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Eric Hynes on Laurent Bécue-Renard’s Of Men and War, a profile of Donald Sutherland, revisiting David Lean’s Brief Encounter and Doctor Zhivago—and more. » - David Hudson...
- 11/15/2015
- Keyframe
Thierry Frémaux to provide live commentary on restored films by Louis Lumière.
Cannes Film Festival general delegate Thierry Frémaux is to present a screening of Lumière! - and will provide live commentary himself - at the 6th Odessa International Film Festival (July 10-18).
The selection of 98 restored films, directed by movie pioneer Louis Lumière and his cameramen, will be screened internationally for the first time following its Cannes premiere.
It forms part of the line-up of the festival, which also announced the 12 films in the international competition and six features (and 18 shorts) in the national competition.
Two Ukrainian films will participate in both competitions.
Oiff president Viktoriya Tigipko said there had been a trend this year for submissions by female directors.
“During this year’s selection we have noticed an interesting trend: 30% of the entries submitted to the International Competition were from female directors,” said Tigipko.
“As a result, four out of the 12 films selected are directed...
Cannes Film Festival general delegate Thierry Frémaux is to present a screening of Lumière! - and will provide live commentary himself - at the 6th Odessa International Film Festival (July 10-18).
The selection of 98 restored films, directed by movie pioneer Louis Lumière and his cameramen, will be screened internationally for the first time following its Cannes premiere.
It forms part of the line-up of the festival, which also announced the 12 films in the international competition and six features (and 18 shorts) in the national competition.
Two Ukrainian films will participate in both competitions.
Oiff president Viktoriya Tigipko said there had been a trend this year for submissions by female directors.
“During this year’s selection we have noticed an interesting trend: 30% of the entries submitted to the International Competition were from female directors,” said Tigipko.
“As a result, four out of the 12 films selected are directed...
- 6/18/2015
- by michael.rosser@screendaily.com (Michael Rosser)
- ScreenDaily
Sebastian here, stealing sharing a great find by Slate's Dana Stevens, who tweeted out a video of the ten short films by the Lumière Brothers that were first shown to the paying public of Paris on December 28, 1895.
On their website, the Institut Llumière offers a look at the screening's program, handed out to the patrons of Le Salon Indien, a room in the basement of the Grand Café on Boulevard des Capucines.
Unfortunately the Institut's image is tiny and barely legible. So presented here, brought to you with the help of all the latest text-formatting technology, a reproduction, updated to include links to watch the films on YouTube:
Le CINÉMATOGRAPHE
Salon Indien
Grand CAFÉ
14, Boulevard des Capucines, 14
Paris
Cel appareil, inventé par Mm. Auguste et Louis Lumière, permet de recueillir, par des séries d'épreuves instantantées, tous les mouvements qui, pendant un temps donné, se sont succédé devant l'objectif, et de...
On their website, the Institut Llumière offers a look at the screening's program, handed out to the patrons of Le Salon Indien, a room in the basement of the Grand Café on Boulevard des Capucines.
Unfortunately the Institut's image is tiny and barely legible. So presented here, brought to you with the help of all the latest text-formatting technology, a reproduction, updated to include links to watch the films on YouTube:
Le CINÉMATOGRAPHE
Salon Indien
Grand CAFÉ
14, Boulevard des Capucines, 14
Paris
Cel appareil, inventé par Mm. Auguste et Louis Lumière, permet de recueillir, par des séries d'épreuves instantantées, tous les mouvements qui, pendant un temps donné, se sont succédé devant l'objectif, et de...
- 4/19/2015
- by Sebastian Nebel
- FilmExperience
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
Here’s a montage showing the “evolution of film” from vimeo user Scott Ewing that grabbed my attention. It’s well put together and definitely reminds you of just how far we have come in terms of size, scope and technology when it comes to film. He describes it as:
The following montage chronicles the evolution of film from its conception in 1878 by Edward J. Muybridge to the Lumiere brothers in 1895. Georges Melies a trip to the moon in 1902 was a total game changer and from there we go to the first theatrical releases starting in 1920-2014.
Read his full description of the work here and watch the video below along with a list of the movies shown:
Film Clips Used
1878 – Eadweard J. Muybridge – Pioneer of Motion Photography
1895 – Auguste & Louis Lumière- Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon
1902 – A Trip to the Moon – Viaje a la Luna – Le Voyage dans la lune...
The following montage chronicles the evolution of film from its conception in 1878 by Edward J. Muybridge to the Lumiere brothers in 1895. Georges Melies a trip to the moon in 1902 was a total game changer and from there we go to the first theatrical releases starting in 1920-2014.
Read his full description of the work here and watch the video below along with a list of the movies shown:
Film Clips Used
1878 – Eadweard J. Muybridge – Pioneer of Motion Photography
1895 – Auguste & Louis Lumière- Sortie des Usines Lumière à Lyon
1902 – A Trip to the Moon – Viaje a la Luna – Le Voyage dans la lune...
- 3/20/2014
- by Graham McMorrow
- City of Films
La Ciotat's Eden music hall, built in 1889, tops £5.5m refurbishment with black-and-white movie billing
When the Lumière brothers screened one of their first moving pictures – The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station – at the Eden theatre at the close of the 19th century, it was said that some of those present were so shocked by the life-like images that they leapt from their seats in terror to flee the oncoming steam locomotive.
On Wednesday, more than a century on, these early black-and-white silent films lasting less than a minute were given top billing in the newly renovated Eden, which claims to be the world's first, and oldest surviving, public cinema.
The historic theatre at La Ciotat, 20 miles east of Marseille, which later played host to Edith Piaf and Yves Montand, has undergone a €6.5m (£5.5m) refurbishment that has more than restored its former glory.
Before Hollywood became the...
When the Lumière brothers screened one of their first moving pictures – The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station – at the Eden theatre at the close of the 19th century, it was said that some of those present were so shocked by the life-like images that they leapt from their seats in terror to flee the oncoming steam locomotive.
On Wednesday, more than a century on, these early black-and-white silent films lasting less than a minute were given top billing in the newly renovated Eden, which claims to be the world's first, and oldest surviving, public cinema.
The historic theatre at La Ciotat, 20 miles east of Marseille, which later played host to Edith Piaf and Yves Montand, has undergone a €6.5m (£5.5m) refurbishment that has more than restored its former glory.
Before Hollywood became the...
- 10/9/2013
- by Kim Willsher
- The Guardian - Film News
Yes, Spielberg predicted an 'implosion' of megabudget movies. But he and many others had done so, wrongly, before
It was supposed to be the summer of the movie apocalypse. No, not movies about the apocalypse, with Tom Cruise or Will Smith dragging themselves through the toxic rubble to represent humanity's only hope of a shower and a clean shave. I mean an apocalypse brought on by too many blockbusters, massed and choking the bloodstream of Hollywood itself, bringing on rigor mortis.
"There's going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen mega-budget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that's going to change the paradigm," said Steven Spielberg himself, at a televised symposium in June. George Lucas sat next to him, nodding.
A month later, Spielberg's prediction seemed to come true, with such would-be blockbusters as The Hangover Part III, After Earth,...
It was supposed to be the summer of the movie apocalypse. No, not movies about the apocalypse, with Tom Cruise or Will Smith dragging themselves through the toxic rubble to represent humanity's only hope of a shower and a clean shave. I mean an apocalypse brought on by too many blockbusters, massed and choking the bloodstream of Hollywood itself, bringing on rigor mortis.
"There's going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen mega-budget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that's going to change the paradigm," said Steven Spielberg himself, at a televised symposium in June. George Lucas sat next to him, nodding.
A month later, Spielberg's prediction seemed to come true, with such would-be blockbusters as The Hangover Part III, After Earth,...
- 8/23/2013
- by Tom Shone
- The Guardian - Film News
Stefan Kudelski, inventor of the first portable professional sound recorder, died Saturday in Switzerland at the age of 84. Word of his death came in a statement from the Kudelski Group, the company he founded. Kudelski created the Nagra (meaning “will record” in his native Polish) in 1951, revolutionizing the world of audio recording for filmmakers. The device, weighing between 8 and 20 pounds, was “one of the tools that made the French New Wave possible, by allowing the young directors in the late 50s and early 60s … to shoot a scene almost anywhere they could think of shooting one,” Randy Thom, director of sound design for Skywalker Sound, told All Things Considered host Melissa Block. Kudelski sold the device to Radio Luxembourg, Italy’s s Rai and the BBC as well as ABC, NBC and CBS in the U.S., according to the Nagra Audio website. Kudelski went on to win five Oscars...
- 1/30/2013
- by THE DEADLINE TEAM
- Deadline TV
The film industry used to have all the power over filmgoers. But home video and the internet have changed that relationship
1896
Auguste and Louis Lumière's Train Pulling Into a Station
Whether or not audiences actually ran screaming, the story exemplifies the astonishing impact of cinema's arrival.
Early 1900s
Local films for local people
The very early film industry has strong local connections, filling venues by offering footage from the neighbourhood.
1915
Birth of a Nation
With the film industry by now settled in Los Angeles, Dw Griffith's breakthrough confirms the ascent of a film language requiring industrial production.
1925
Lucille LeSueur is renamed Joan Crawford by a fan-magazine competition
Keeping fans happy is crucial to the movie industry from the beginning – including giving them some power.
1930s-1960s
Hollywood's Golden Age
In its prime, the studio system was hugely efficient at concentrating power over cinematic output in executives' hands.
1969
Easy Rider...
1896
Auguste and Louis Lumière's Train Pulling Into a Station
Whether or not audiences actually ran screaming, the story exemplifies the astonishing impact of cinema's arrival.
Early 1900s
Local films for local people
The very early film industry has strong local connections, filling venues by offering footage from the neighbourhood.
1915
Birth of a Nation
With the film industry by now settled in Los Angeles, Dw Griffith's breakthrough confirms the ascent of a film language requiring industrial production.
1925
Lucille LeSueur is renamed Joan Crawford by a fan-magazine competition
Keeping fans happy is crucial to the movie industry from the beginning – including giving them some power.
1930s-1960s
Hollywood's Golden Age
In its prime, the studio system was hugely efficient at concentrating power over cinematic output in executives' hands.
1969
Easy Rider...
- 7/6/2012
- by Ben Walters
- The Guardian - Film News
Études de mouvements à Paris
Directed by Joris Ivens
France, 1927
Visual studies have long been relegated to the fringe of cinema appreciation. A mainstay of early cinema of attractions, today these films are often appreciated solely for their historical or social value rather than their visual or artistic merits. In 1927 Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens took the streets of Paris to make his short film, Études de mouvements à Paris. The film is not necessarily spectacular in any way; its construction is practical, its focus familiar and its legacy relatively non-existent but it remains a strong model for the basic appeal of cinema.
Though not too familiar with his other work, Ivens’ films made in the 1920s all fit with this vague model of “showing” rather than “telling”. Even in films where he featured characters, they seemed to exist beyond the frame of reference of any story and were pawns in his visual creation.
Directed by Joris Ivens
France, 1927
Visual studies have long been relegated to the fringe of cinema appreciation. A mainstay of early cinema of attractions, today these films are often appreciated solely for their historical or social value rather than their visual or artistic merits. In 1927 Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens took the streets of Paris to make his short film, Études de mouvements à Paris. The film is not necessarily spectacular in any way; its construction is practical, its focus familiar and its legacy relatively non-existent but it remains a strong model for the basic appeal of cinema.
Though not too familiar with his other work, Ivens’ films made in the 1920s all fit with this vague model of “showing” rather than “telling”. Even in films where he featured characters, they seemed to exist beyond the frame of reference of any story and were pawns in his visual creation.
- 1/30/2012
- by Justine
- SoundOnSight
"Martin Scorsese's Hugo begins with a vertiginous descent that only gains speed as it follows a train and barrels into the station that will be its main setting," writes Phil Coldiron in Slant. "Leaving the tracks, it continues on its path through the concourse, moving past digital extras, the first of many ghostly presences, before seamlessly entering the realm of the real — that is, the soundstage. The worlds of Lumière (the train: the document of reality) and Méliès (the impossible camera: the spectacle of fantasy) come together, the latter used as a tool to try to restore the long-lost thrill of the former. This is the first moment of Scorsese's career that could accurately be described as Cameronian; it's also the first appearance of Hugo's exceptionally personal cinematic gambit."
"Like nearly all of Scorsese's films, Hugo can be taken as personal allegory," agrees Adam Cook. "It can also...
"Like nearly all of Scorsese's films, Hugo can be taken as personal allegory," agrees Adam Cook. "It can also...
- 11/25/2011
- MUBI
Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, produced by Peter Jackson, saw its North American premiere last week when it closed this year's edition of the AFI Fest. Though it won't open wide in the States until December 21, when it goes up against David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Brad Bird's Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol and, a few days later, Spielberg's own War Horse — as Michael Cieply reports in the New York Times, it's going to be "a hot and crowded holiday at the box office" — it's been dominating 40-some-odd other markets since it began rolling out a little over two weeks ago. I thought we'd quickly check in on how things have been going for Tintin since our first roundup sort of petered out and lost interest a few days after the world premiere in Brussels.
The first...
The first...
- 11/14/2011
- MUBI
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