In this devastating documentary, director Ophuls interviews a wealth of people affected by the Nazi occupation of France - survivors, participants and other 'interested parties'. The result is a definitive oral and visual account of a troubled period of 20th century history.
Everything about Marcel Ophuls's extraordinary account of the Occupation of France is arranged by meticulous contrast. The town of Clermont-Ferrand itself was chosen a... more >
Everything about Marcel Ophuls's extraordinary account of the Occupation of France is arranged by meticulous contrast. The town of Clermont-Ferrand itself was chosen as it was both close to Vichy and served as the centre of Maquis activity in the Auvergne. Personal testimonies are juxtaposed with contemporary newsreels, while prominent politicians and everyday citizens ponder local incidents and their wider context. Expert and unreliable witnesses are given equal opportunity, as they were all in the crowds that witnessed the respective arrivals of Henti Pétain in 1940 and Charles De Gaulle four years later. French and Germans, aristocrats and peasants all contribute to the demolition of the stereotypes and clichés of the war to reveal that the population who endured the Nazi tyranny could not be divided so easily into resistors and collaborators as even those who lived through this traumatic time would like - or would like have those who came after - to believe. < less
There’s an anecdote, a few minutes into the second part of Marcel Ophuls’ overwhelming documentary account of the Nazi Occupation as experienced by one French town, wh... more >
There’s an anecdote, a few minutes into the second part of Marcel Ophuls’ overwhelming documentary account of the Nazi Occupation as experienced by one French town, which perfectly illustrates in a matter of minutes the thesis Ophuls is working towards over the course of the remaining four hours: the French desire to preserve business as usual by any means necessary while under fascist rule. A German officer of the time, and a French cinema owner, recall an incident in which a platoon of German soldiers filing into the cinema for a matinee screening came under attack from Resistance fighters armed with live hand grenades. Eight people died, and as the cinema owner wryly notes: “The ambulances arrived, and the show went on”.
Claude Lanzmann’s similarly lengthy Shoah sprawled over Europe plotting a map of the Holocaust from point to mortal point, but Ophuls here limits his inquiries to the town of Clermont-Ferrand, making his documentary a more contained viewing experience. The territory explored is less geographical than psychological: a stamp around those adjacent areas on either side of the fine lines between acceptance and resistance, opposition and collaboration.
Unlike today’s anything-goes, shot-on-the-hoof documentary culture, where the subjects are shot in whatever they happen to be wearing at the time, what’s initially most beguiling about Ophuls’ film is that everyone appears to have dressed up to mark the occasion of being interviewed, and often gathered their family and friends around them, either for support or as a show of defiance to those who would have had their loved ones killed. This is clearly a big moment for the residents of Clermont, an opportunity to get their thoughts and opinions on the record some twenty-five years on from the events discussed.
The approach yields countless telling moments over the four hours. An aristocratic ex-fascist leads the filmmaker around his lavishly-furnished home; a couple of local farmers are overruled by one of their wives, sitting in the kitchen; a proud father talks about the rationing of cigarettes while the camera pans to his son, possibly a statistic of the post-War baby boom, lighting one up.
Ophuls preserves throughout a strictly democratic feel (a sense that there are, in most cases, other people in the room, and not always people who agree with what the speaker is saying), and seems to be making the point that the idea of a united front opposing fascism is, in itself, a fascist one: the reality was always more complex and conflicting than that, and to throw a rope or draw a line around the French people – for whatever reason – is, in its own way, as inherently constraining as rounding them all up to be shot as freedom fighters.
The Sorrow And The Pity is, necessarily, a long haul, and perhaps not quite as enlightening as Shoah. (These are the problems of setting up the camera in one small town: you end up meeting the same people, and going round and round in circles after a while.) But when one interviewee states that “the French aren’t very interested in politics… all they do is [something as demonstrative as] storm the Bastille every now and again”, you do realise that to be even slightly interested and active in politics is better than the track record of certain other nations, and that there is now something deeply engrained in the French consciousness – something as evident from, say, a film like Irreversible as from this – warning against the dangers of complacency, of standing by and watching, of failure to take action, which jars with the cultures of those other Western states (the US and Britain especially) who went unconquered by the Nazis, and tend to look back on the Second World War with nostalgic reverence rather than anger, sorrow or pity.
< less
