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Rumanian Jew Natan Tannenzaft became a French citizen and changed his name to Bernard Natan. In 1929, he headed Pathe-Cinema, once the world's largest film company. It eventually went broke and Natan died in the Holocaust. Writes Dr. Slade: "Natan's story illustrates the subversive role pornography can play in a culture, a factor often ignored in the current debates over erotic expression. Natan's is a classic tale of an outsider, given panache because it udnerscores the hypocrisy of cultures that rely on what Jay Gertzman calls "pariah capitalists," that is, the ostracized entrepreneurs of the marginal, the secret, and the forbidden. Because they need the services of pornographers, societies tolerate them at the same time that they constrain and punish them for doing what other individuals of higher status also do. Natan as a pornographer parodied a bland, reactionary mainstream cinema; Natan as an entrepreneur developed and then trashed a mainstream film industry whose pioneers themselves had corrupted it." Natan shot stags in Paris after World War I. During the 1920s, France shot more stags than anyone (Slade). Its leaders were Dominique and Natan who both used humor, costumes, stories and editing to uplift the primitive genre. Both preferred plot and expressive faces to genital close-ups. Natan developed his early pornos at the laboratory Rapid Film which also processed commercial films. In 1920, Bernard shot at least four stags (The Daughters of Lot, A Well-Served Cocktail, The Little Hotel and Madame Butterfly) around Marseilles. Daughters shows a sacrilegious retelling of the Genesis tale. Patriach Lot wakes up to find his daughters engaged in cunnilingus. He joins in. As with other Natan films, there are no cum shots. Cocktail and Hotel develop on the scatological joke about the waiter who urinates in the soup.
Natan gets sodomized in Butterfly along with many of his other stags. In 1921, Bernard became a French citizen and began working for Paramount Pictures as a publicity stringer. He produced at least three more stags in 1922, including Le Moine which was retitled in the US as Monkey Business. "Outside an abbey, a "nun" in Capuchin habit flirtatiously watches a tattered gardener hoe his beans. When she raises her robes, he drops to his knees (in a parody of reverence) to perform cunnilingus. The huge wings of her wimple flutter comically. At that moment, the monk peers out the abbey window. By the time he arrives on the scene, the nun is bent over, fellating the gardener." (Slade) While his publicity business grew, Natan kept making porno, paying off national and local police. In 1924 he met up with Alexander Stavisky, an expert corporate looter and money launderer. "The closer he [Natan] came to success in the legitimate film industry, the more he seemed to victimize himself in his stag reels." (Slade) In 1926, Bernard produced two mainstream French films - The Lady of Liban Manor and The Nude Woman. He also produced his grossest stag - f--- a Duck. Natan, a vagabond, steals a duck and sodomizes it. Disgusted, a farm girl fetches her employer who mounts her. Then Natan sucks off the employer and allows himself to be sodomized. Dr. Slade writes that you can understand f--- a Duck "as a political statement about economics and social class, as an assertion of the animal nature of human sexuality, as a reminder of the force of voyeurism, or simply as a cynical comment on Natan's increasingly "cultured" activities as a legitimate moviemaker." By 1928, none of France's movie studios were equipped for sound. Natan bought out the giant producer Pathe-Cinema and renamd in it Pathe-Natan. In 1930 he fired Jean Gremillon, director of Little Lisa, because of the film's Jew hatred. In 1933, he produced Rene Clair's The Last Billionaire which mocked Hitler. French fascists rioted at its 1934 opening and the director fled France. Dr Slade: "The verdict of most historians is that the two largest French companies, Gaumont-Franco-Film-Aubert and Pathe-Natan, in fostering fluff, simply stifled innovation and serious intent. The "Golden Age of French Film," as the decade of the 1930s is sometimes called, took its name from the output of independent studios, the products of talented artists unwelcome at the two giants. Even the good films were not blockbusters, and the Pathe-Nathan balance sheet grew dismal." Pathe-Natan declared bankruptcy in 1935. Bernard was arrested for fraud in September of 1936 and never regained his freedom. In 1940, after the Germans invaded France, Natan was loaded into a cattle car with the first of the thousands of Jewish deportees. Whether he made it to a concentration camp or died en route is not known.
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