Air France loves the cinema – Episode 1 “1933-1945”
First interactions with French and international cinema.
Following its creation, Air France initiated a variety of high-profile partnerships and promotional strategies. The aviator and writer St Exupéry was hired as production consultant and press relations officer, and was behind films such as Weekend in Algiers and Atlantique Sud, aimed at promoting the new routes and the past and present greatness of postal aviation. Air France also participated in more than a dozen feature films from this period, which can be divided into two categories – those with an “aviation sequence”, often involving a plane taking off or landing as in Nemo’s Bank from 1934 (sequence shot at Le Bourget with a plane with a seahorse logo, borrowed from Air Orient) and “aviation films” in which Air France was more closely involved in a tangible way, such as Courrier Sud in 1936.
In 1941, the famous film "Casablanca" was one of the very few feature films to explicitly use the image of the airline during the Second World War, and a unique testimony to its control by the German authorities during the Occupation.
