Talk:Bernard Natan
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I'm moving the following text from the article because it wasn't sourced or wikiformatted. I'm sure it's factually correct but it needs to be worked into the article better.--Sus scrofa 02:59, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Bernard Natan was born on 14 July 1886 in Jassy (Romania). In 1906, at the age of 20 he emigrated to France where he developed a passion for cinema. After working as a projectionist in a cinema in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, he set up a small company called Ciné-Actualités with a small capital (30,000 francs). He produced several films, including “L’Adjudant Grinchepi” and “A nous le pôle” which have not survived. In December 1910 he suffered in the wave of prudishness driven by Senator Béranger. He was then prosecuted (along with several others) and given a four-month prison sentence for “affront to public decency” for the production of films in which he himself had acted. It is not known whether these films were truly pornographic, or simply risqué, the sort that all film companies of the time regularly produced. This indiscretion committed at the age of twenty-six would regularly be exploited in defamatory campaigns against him in the 1930s and under the Occupation. More surprisingly, however, a myth created a decade or so ago would present him as the main producer of pornographic films in France from 1922; such a portrayal is clearly absurd.
In 1912 he created a new company, Rapid-Film, which over the years would become a film laboratory and an important film processing studio. At the same time, he created Rapid-Publicité, to supply publicity films which were shown in cinemas in the intervals. He also produced several documentary films, and notably won exclusive rights to film the 1924 Olympic Games.
This activity was interrupted by the First World War. Despite being Romanian, Natan enlisted for the duration of the war, and was discharged in 1918 with the Military Cross and the rank of sergeant.
From 1919 he was finally able to throw himself into film production. On the premises of the “Grands bazars du bâtiment” in Rue Francœur, of which he occupied at first a few hundred square metres and then all six thousand square metres of the building, he built two film studios which were opened with great ceremony.
He set up Productions Natan and went on to produce many films. Bernard Natan was a success. He was vice-President of the Chambre Syndicale de la Cinématographie. In 1929, with the help of the Bauer and Marchal bank, he bought, for the sum of 50 million francs, shares held by Charles Pathé and his associates in the Pathé Cinéma company. Before the war, this had been the largest film company in the world, but it had been deliberately dismantled by its founder who felt that the struggle was impossible in the face of American competition. Bernard Natan rebuilt the company from an empty shell. He bought the Joinville studios and Pathé Consortium’s distribution system from Cinéromans. He acquired a network of more than sixty cinemas (and a hundred “associated” cinemas) in Paris, the rest of France and Belgium. He relaunched the production of films which had been abandoned by Pathé Cinéma at the beginning of the decade, and equipped the company for talking pictures. He relaunched Pathé Journal, which had been abandoned in 1926, and adapted it for sound newsreels. He also developed Pathé Rural. With an eye on the future, other steps included buying Baird television patents and the patents for Professor Chrétien’s Hypergonar (the precursor of CinemaScope).
