Continental Films: French Cinema under German Control

by Christine Leteux, Bertrand Tavernier (Foreword)

From 1940 to 1944, the German-owned Continental Films dominated the French film landscape, producing thirty features throughout the Nazi occupation. Charged with producing entertaining and profitable films rather than propaganda, producer Alfred Greven employed some of the greatest French actors and most prestigious directors of the time, including Maurice Tourneur, Henri Decoin, Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Marcel Carné.
Using recently opened archival documents, including reams of testimony from the épuration (purification) hearings conducted shortly after the war, Christine Leteux has produced the most authoritative and complete history of the company and its impact on the French film industry—both during the war and after. She captures the wide range of responses to the firm from those who were eager to work for a company whose ideology matched their own, to others who reluctantly accepted contracts out of necessity, to those who abhorred the company but felt compelled to participate in order to protect family members from Nazi reprisals. She examines not only the formation and management of Continental Films but also the personalities involved, the fraught and often deadly political circumstances of the period, the critical reception of the films, and many of the more notorious and controversial events.
As Bertrand Tavernier explains in his foreword, Leteux overturns many of the preconceptions and clichés that have come to be associated with Continental Films. Published to rave reviews in French and translated by the author into English, this work shatters expectations and will reinvigorate study of a lesser-known but significant period of French film history.

264 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Christine Leteux is the author of the biographies Albert Capellani: Cinéaste du romanesque (self-translated into English as Albert Capellani: Pioneer of the Silent Screen) and Maurice Tourneur: Réalisateur sans frontières. She is the translator of several books by British film historian and filmmaker Kevin Brownlow.

Reviews

[Bill Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thanks to the translator and publisher for making an English language version of this book available. Continental was a German film production company operating in France during the WW2 occupation, using French talent in furtherance of Goebbels' dream for a postwar European dominance of the worldwide film market. Every Continental production I've managed to see is, at the very least, interesting and mostly free from overt politics -- not an easy thing to achieve in a war. This book focuses on the personalities more than the movies and is probably more interesting the more one already knows about mid-20th Century French film. I was hoping for more information on the movies themselves, since they are for the most part unknown in the US, but what's here is certainly fascinating history and will, I hope, lead to more exposure of the surviving films.

[Denis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This French book is a must-read for anyone interested in the fascinating moviemaking scene of France during the troubled period of the German occupation. The Continental was the production company that the Germans opened in Paris to make French films directly under the control of Goebbels. Of course, nothing is as black and white as one may think, and things were as chaotic as they were complicated. Christine Leneux has unearthed a treasure trove of documents (especially minutes from the so-called “Epuration” phase, after the German defeat) that allow her to explore thoroughly, and with great details, how the company was run, who truly was its mysterious leader, Greven, and how some of the most talented French directors and most celebrated stars of the time came up to work for such a notorious studio. Many, of course, were more or less forced. Leneux reveals heroic lives and denounces the cowardly and opportunistic behaviors of a few unscrupulous names. She also, often, sympathetically underlines the conundrums and dilemmas that many people (including technicians who had to work, no matter what, to go on living) were facing. Some decisions were obviously difficult to make. Yet, at the same time, the Continental offered to the local audience some of the greatest French films ever made. Those years were defined by ambiguity, and Leteux intelligently guides us to better understand what happened. The lively preface by director Bertrand Tavernier, who made a movie about the subject, is worth reading too.