MostlyFilm regular Paul Duane , who has written about his films Barbaric Genius and Very Extremely Dangerous in these pages, has teamed up with the most excellent David Cairns to make an acclaimed documentary about the once-notorious, now obscure, Bernard Natan, which will receive its English premiere this weekend.
In this 2-part essay the 2 nd part will be published tomorrow , David recounts the whole strange story. He was a Romanian who became a French citizen. Paul is Irish, I am Scottish. Naturally, we get lost on the way to Paris. Then we have to wait ten minutes in this curiously damp, dark little town, until another train comes to take us to the City of Light.
Later, we will realize something about Drancy that makes our blood run cold. Paul makes documentaries, but I have never done so. My so-called career is spent bouncing between fiction films and film criticism. A documentary about a fiction filmmaker seems a good way to bridge the gap.
When he tries to buy our train tickets in Spanish I realize we could be out of our depth here. I wrote a blog post about this, based on what I could glean from Wikipedia, and Paul read it. He immediately felt something was fishy. Preliminary research suggested that maybe there were two Bernard Natans.
The mogul and the smut-hound. The French right-wing press had it in for the bigshot, who was foreign and Jewish, so they deliberately confused him with his infamous namesake. Since this is a film about a Frenchman which nobody in France has made in the seventy years since he died, we think it qualifies: the panel agree, and practically pitch the movie to us.
