Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly, the French stag film and the Natan affair

A sex parody of Puccini made in France around 1920 is one of the oldest surviving films to show sex between men. In 1993 it was pinned on Bernard Natan, the Jewish head of Pathé murdered at Auschwitz, and the evidence says it was probably not him.

Paris, September 1941. At the Palais Berlitz, on the boulevard des Italiens, the German occupiers and their French collaborators open a propaganda exhibition called Le Juif et la France, "The Jew and France". One of its themes is the supposed Jewish grip on French cinema, and among the faces on display is Bernard Natan, once the head of Pathé, the biggest film company in the country. Natan cannot see it. He is in a French prison¹.

A year later he would be sent to Auschwitz. Half a century after that, an American academic would make him the star of another story: the man behind Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly, a French sex film of about 1920 and one of the earliest surviving films to show sex between men. This page tells both stories, the film and the man, and why the second has done so much harm to the first.

Puccini goes underground

Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly opened at La Scala in Milan in 1904 and became one of the most popular operas in the world. Its story was known to everyone: an American naval officer, Lieutenant Pinkerton, marries a young Japanese woman in Nagasaki, sails away and comes back years later with an American wife.

The French stag film turns the tragedy into a sex farce. Its title is a pun in itself, roughly "the modern household of Madame Butterfly", and it borrows the names and the setting of the opera to make its jokes.

It belongs to the world of French erotic films of the 1920s, many of them made to be shown in brothels as an overture to the business of the house. Thomas Waugh, the historian who first studied these films in detail, dates Madame Butterfly to 1920². Others place it a few years later, but the early 1920s is the usual range.

Five characters and a locked door

Pinkerton, the strapping American sailor, marries Butterfly and has sex with her, while her maid, named Soosooky after Suzuki in the opera, watches and pleasures herself. Pinkerton leaves.

A male servant, called Pink-hop in descriptions of the film, spies on Butterfly and the maid as they have sex together, and masturbates as he watches. When Pinkerton comes back, the servant is slow to open the door. As a punishment, Pinkerton has oral and anal sex with him, and then with the maid.

A fifth character arrives, Mr Sharpless, named after the American consul in the opera. He has sex with Butterfly and tells her that Pinkerton is a bigamist. Then everyone returns for the finale, in which all five have sex together, the women with the men and the servant with both men at once. The film ends with Pinkerton waving at the audience.

Accounts of the film stress how ambitious it is for a stag: real exterior shots, careful costumes and sets, and a plot that takes its time.

Waugh reads it as one of the earliest surviving films to show sex between men, but in a scene whose logic stays heterosexual². The sex between men happens inside a group scene with women, first as a punishment, then as a joke. Nobody in the film is meant to be seen as homosexual. That is why the title of first gay porn film usually goes instead to an American reel of about 1929, The Surprise of a Knight.

The same reel in a different room

For Waugh, the English intertitles are a small piece of evidence about the American audience of stag films. The demographic sameness of the rooms where they were shown, white men gathered in lodges and fraternities, broke out from time to time in racist and xenophobic humour. His example is precisely this film: the racist jokes about Asian sexual anatomy and Asian American social types added to the American titles of a French reel³.

Celine Parreñas Shimizu, in her study of how Asian and Asian American women have been shown on screen, discusses the film among the early examples of that history⁴. In the opera, the Japanese woman exists for the pleasure of the white officer; the stag only says so openly.

The French version and the American version are the same images. What changed between Paris and the United States was what the audience was told to laugh at.

Clips from French erotic films of this period reached a much wider public in 2002, when the director Michel Reilhac assembled Polissons et galipettes, released in English as The Good Old Naughty Days. The compilation, shown at the Cannes Film Festival, draws on a reel listed as Miss Butterfly and dated there to 1925, a reminder of how loose the dating of these films remains⁵.

Slade's pornographer

In 1993 the American media scholar Joseph W. Slade published an article in the Journal of Film and Video with a striking title: "Bernard Natan: France's Legendary Pornographer". He argued that Natan, before he became a mogul, had produced at least twenty French hardcore films between 1920 and 1927, among them Madame Butterfly⁶.

Slade went further. He claimed that Natan's laboratory supplied films to a company that distributed them through clandestine screening rooms and brothels, that nearly all the French sex films of the period with scenes between men came from him, and that Natan himself performed in some of them, Madame Butterfly included. Much of his case rested on the resemblance between one of the performers and photographs of Natan, and on earlier French writing about erotic cinema⁶.

The article was read widely, and the claim travelled. The stag film that had been anonymous for seventy years now had a director, a producer and a famous face.

Who was Bernard Natan

He was born Natan Tannenzaft in Iași, Romania, on 14 July 1886, to a Jewish family. He came to Paris as a young man in the first years of the century and went to work in cinema, as a projectionist and in a film laboratory⁷.

In 1911 he was convicted, together with others in the trade, over erotic films, and given a fine and a short prison sentence. When war broke out in 1914 he volunteered for the French army, was gassed at the front and won the Croix de guerre, which led to his conviction being wiped from the record. In 1921 he became a French citizen and took the name Bernard Natan⁷.

His company, Rapid Film, grew fast. It filmed the 1924 Paris Olympics, and in 1929 it built a studio in Montmartre. That same year Natan took over Pathé, merged it with his own firm and ran Pathé-Natan through the arrival of sound, the revival of its newsreel and productions such as Raymond Bernard's war film Les Croix de bois (1932)¹.

The Depression caught up with the company. Pathé-Natan went bankrupt in 1936, and Natan was charged with fraud. Police arrested him at his Paris home in December 1938, and he was convicted and imprisoned the following year¹.

A rumour as a weapon

Through the 1930s the French press attacked Natan relentlessly, and much of the attack was openly antisemitic. Newspapers revealed his "hidden" Jewish origins and called him the Pathé swindler.

The stories about sex films grew in the same soil. According to the film writer Pamela Hutchinson, they circulated as industry gossip at the time of his fall and surfaced in an illustrated report in Paris-Match. The 1911 conviction gave them a grain of truth to grow from¹.

Under the German occupation the campaign became official. His portrait hung in the 1941 exhibition, and the Vichy regime stripped him of his French nationality. In September 1942 he was handed from prison to the Drancy transit camp and, as a stateless Jew, put on convoy 37, which left for Auschwitz on 25 September 1942. He was murdered there¹.

After the war his name largely disappeared from the histories of French cinema. When Slade's article appeared in 1993, the old slur came back with an academic footnote attached, and Natan, as Hutchinson put it, went from a forgotten man to a dirty joke¹.

Is it him

Natan's family answered first. His nephew, André Rossel-Kirschen, a former Resistance fighter turned publisher, asked the Journal of Film and Video for a right of reply and was refused. In 2004 he published a book on the Pathé-Natan affair, in which he wrote that he had watched most of the films in question at the Kinsey Institute and that the performer said to be Natan looked between 18 and 25, while Natan was around 40 at the time⁷.

In 2013 two Irish filmmakers, David Cairns and Paul Duane, released the documentary Natan, shown that year at the Telluride Film Festival. It sets discreet excerpts from the films beside official photographs of Natan and shows that the performers identified as him are other men⁸.

Reviewing it, Hutchinson concluded that there is no evidence at all for the story that Natan acted in stag films¹. Whether he produced any after 1911 has never been proved either.

What can honestly be said

Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly is French. It was probably made in the early 1920s, by a Paris producer of erotic films whose name is unknown, for an audience in brothels and private rooms. It exists in two versions whose intertitles tell us as much about their audiences as about the film.

It shows sex between men earlier than any other surviving film, but as a punishment and a joke inside a heterosexual orgy. And the attribution to Bernard Natan, a Jewish film pioneer murdered at Auschwitz, is unproven, contested by the evidence of the images themselves and tainted by the uses his enemies made of it.

The wider story is told in the chapter on stag films, the secret reels where men first filmed men.