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All films relate to their place and time, but some are almost incomprehensible out of context. Such is the case with Marcel Ophuls’s great 1969 documentary Sorrow and Regret, although its story is well known. The four-hour film in two parts, which is streamed OVID in a new restoration and also available on Milestone and Kanopy, is about World War II France, focusing on life in the small town of Clermont-Ferrand, in the center of the country. It covered the German invasion and occupation of France; the formation of the Vichy regime, just twenty-nine miles from Clermont, under Marshal Philippe Pétain; the rise of the French Resistance; and the Liberation in 1944 and beyond. What made these facts known is largely the film itself: it is a historical work that changed the course of history, and its impact on this moment is illustrated in the resistance it faced and ultimately overcame.
In “The Sorrow and the Pity,” Ophuls — who is making his first feature-length documentary — tells a sprawling and convoluted story in a form that now seems classic, even hackneyed. It consists mainly of interviews with a wide group of participants and witnesses of the events. Ophuls cuts the material into parts of interviews and assembles them to develop the arc of the story; the interviews are interspersed with illustrative archival footage. As familiar as the format is now, when Ophuls made The Sorrow and the Pity, few notable documentaries were constructed this way. Prolonged on-camera interviews depended on portable dubbing equipment, which was not developed until the late 1950s, leading to Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicles of a Summer (the film for which Morin coined the term “cinéma-vérité”), Robert Drew’s Original, and such successors as the Maysels brothers’ Salesman and Frederick Wiseman’s Hospital.
Unlike these modern masterpieces, however, Sorrow and Pity is neither immersive nor reflective. Instead, its originality lies in its very simplicity – its deceptive modesty. Although Ophuls and his co-writer, Andre Harris, are heard, sometimes even seen, in discussion with the interviewees, the film does not emphasize these interactions or their centrality to the action on screen. Rather, their intervention is most emphatic and most noticeable in editing the large body of interview footage (between fifty and sixty hours, according to Ophuls) into a tight, coherent narrative. Ophuls and Harris rarely challenge the subjects’ assumptions or claims; putting their interviewees at ease, they gather a diverse and abundant array of accounts and perspectives. It is this diversity – its panoramic scope, its complexity, its conflicting perspectives – that is the film’s raison d’être.
The interviews feature a remarkable array of participants, filmed on location (in their homes or workplaces, or in public, or at a cleverly chosen significant location) and suggest a cross-section of wartime French society: a sampling of classes, ideologies and wartime activities , making individual speakers and their experiences both unique and exemplary. (Only the absence of women as subjects on screen diminishes the film’s representational authority.) Sorrow and Pity features Resistance fighters of humble circumstances—whether farmers or working people—as well as high-ranking politicians and even aristocrats who were motivated by patriotism, outrage or ideology. The film similarly spotlights collaborationists from the expensive upper bourgeoisie, along with middle-class functionaries and small business owners who were forced to collaborate with the occupiers. There is even an unrepentant defender of Vichy (and son-in-law of one of its officials) who goes to grotesque lengths to minimize the effects of the Holocaust on the Jews of France and the role of the French government in it. Ophuls also places the daily life of the occupation and resistance in an international political context through interviews with British politicians and officers, German officials (including Hitler’s translator), and the French politician Pierre Mendez France, who worked with Charles de Gaulle’s Free French government in exile. (Along with his account of anti-Semitic persecution at Vichy and his escape from France, Mendes France offers warnings about the enduring and unquenchable temptations of anti-Semitism and xenophobia.)
Ophuls’ editorial storytelling has a deft sheen that moves seamlessly between the personal and the general, the representative and the distinctive. The interviews have a powerful, almost literary force: the story of a Claremont store owner named Klein, who is careful not to be misidentified as Jewish (a strange anticipation of Joseph Losey’s 1976 drama Monsieur Klein); a woman who was convicted on the basis of handwriting samples of exposing a Gestapo resister; and the story of a gay British spy with a German lover in Paris. We learn of the escape of French politicians to Morocco en route to London, and of the agonizing decision by British leaders to bombard the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, Algeria (then French territory) to prevent it from falling into German hands. Farmer Louis Grave, who was active in the Resistance, was exposed, arrested and deported to Buchenwald, but after the Liberation he refused to seek revenge against the person who had exposed him to the Gestapo, nor did Grave offer forgiveness. He bore the knowledge of betrayal as if it were a form of moral revenge superior to persecution or violence.
This range of backgrounds, inclinations and activities marks the shattering power of Ophuls’ practical aesthetic. It states publicly what, in the twenty-five years that separate the film from Liberation, was privately understood, whether in family circles or in the halls of power, but remained largely unspoken. It contradicts the founding myth of France’s postwar Fourth and Fifth Republics—namely, that France, with the exception of some dastardly politicians and a relatively small number of collaborationists, was largely a country of resistance, that the French Resistance far outnumbered and outnumbered the French collaborationists. Relatedly, the film also provides an intellectual x-ray of the ideological quagmire of anti-Semitism and anti-communism that underpinned France’s defeat by Germany and its willingness to cooperate—the demonization of the democratic moderate left, the preference of many for the anti-democratic far right, the racist hatred , which feeds such a propensity, and the admiration for a bloodthirsty foreign dictator who fosters and encourages these authoritarian sympathies. (A word to the wise.)
“Grief and regret” in no way diminishes the dedication or effectiveness of the Resistance fighters or their behind-the-scenes supporters and helpers. Far from debunking the Resistance, Ophuls reinforces our vision of the heroism of the Resistance precisely because their actions were extraordinary—because they occurred amid the passivity of many neighbors and the active hostility of others. Moreover, the documentary also highlights that active sympathizers of the Resistance, who did not carry arms, but supported it simply by knowing about it – knowing that their neighbors were engaged in guerrilla fighting and saying nothing – were also heroic. The potential cost of resistance – arrest, torture, execution, deportation to concentration camps – also resonates in the interviews, emphasizing the courage of the resistance while instilling empathy for those who were simply going about their work. One interviewee, the British politician Anthony Eden, served as something of a spokesman for Ophuls, reserving his judgment for the people of Vichy France, arguing that those who had not lived through the “horror of occupation by a foreign power” had “no right” to pronounce” on those who did it.
In its reality, though, the film is a work of outrage, less at individuals, even the most despicable from a point of view, than at France as a whole—post-war France and its self-silencing, self-excusing political mythology. There’s something oddly, implicitly meta about The Sorrow and the Pity: its main story is France telling itself a story. Yet this myth of a nation of resisters is not explicitly deployed in the film the way, say, the myth of Manifest Destiny is deployed in the greatest Hollywood Westerns; it is there as an undeniable and atmospheric background to the action, the main idea on which the action depends. In Sorrow and Regret, this “action” is the conversation that reveals the fabrication of this founding myth. The whole film is actually a counter-story – ie. the complex and elusive truth that has little place in French public life or in the sense of French identity. It’s as if all of France is involved as a virtual reverse angle of the documentary – its defiant, defiant close-up.
Ophüls, who was born in 1927, was involved in the Events of May 1968. He, along with his film’s producers Harris and Alain de Sedouil, were working for French television at the time and went on strike, costing them their jobs and their programs. For all the political demands of students and other activists at the time, May’s decisive focus was cultural change: breaking down the rigid mores, the inaccessible and unsynchronized barrier between France’s public culture and the lives of its inhabitants.
Yet the film, attempting to break the silence about the realities of Vichy France, was silenced. Grief and Regret premiered in West Germany in 1969, but although it was intended for French television (which was then entirely state-owned), it was rejected for broadcast by a trick that was itself a gag. The filmmakers organized private screenings, but TV bureaucrats simply never attended, claiming they didn’t have time to consider such a long film—as if, trying to avoid the likely controversy of rejecting the film on its merits, they were ignoring it hoping it would go away. Instead, the film received a very limited theatrical release and was not shown on French television until October 1981 – five months after François Mitterrand, a socialist, was elected president of France. After making air, according to The world, “it was not the political and sociological event the channels were expecting.” This seeming failure was a mark of the film’s success: in its relatively secret way, it had already done its epochal work. The silence was broken; the revelations had become public knowledge. ♦
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