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“The Sorrow and the Pity” is by far the most famous documentary by Marcel Ophuls. If all you know of the film is its use as a running joke in “Annie Hall,” then it is beyond time to take a look at Ophuls’s exhaustive, densely structured reconstruction of life in Clermont-Ferrand, France, during the Nazi occupation. The film has been credited with puncturing the postwar myth that France resisted German rule en masse.
Ophuls talks to resistors and admitted collaborators alike, from people who would have us believe they saw little or nothing to people who saw everything. Running nearly four and a half hours, the film is divided into two parts — “The Collapse” and “The Choice” — as it moves through how France laid down its arms against the Nazi invasion and then normalized the German presence. Witnesses discuss the attraction of fascism, loyalty to the Vichy puppet government, how movie screens remained illuminated (albeit with Nazi censorship) and how Paris, after the initial shock of capitulation, returned to a simulacrum of its vivacious self. One interviewee says that the Gestapo could not have been as destructive as it was without the help of the French police.
Part of Ophuls’s diagnosis is social. Pierre Mendès-France, a Jewish lieutenant with the French Air Force who escaped to Britain (and later, in the 1950s, served as the prime minister of France), says that it was easy for the Nazis to draw on latent antisemitism and anti-British sentiment in the country. Denis Rake, a Briton who worked in France as a secret agent during Vichy rule, points to class differences: He got the most help, he says, from railway workers. The bourgeoisie, by contrast, had more to lose.
We hear of divisions within the resistance itself — notably communist versus non-communist — and of the debates its members had about what actions to take. Ophuls shows how sentiment changed quickly after the liberation. And Emile Coulaudon, a resistance fighter who had the nom de guerre Colonel Gaspar, delivers a sobering assessment from the standpoint of more than 50 years ago: He warns of the “risk in the world of the reappearance of Nazism, or whatever goes by another name but is still Nazism.”
