The Sorrow and the Pity [1969]

 Few films have so powerfully combatted collective historical amnesia like Marcel Ophüls’ monumental 4-½-hour-long documentary did by dismantling the carefully established Gaullist myth – much to everyone’s chagrin – that the French populace had resisted the Nazi Occupation en masse and were tragically martyred by it. No wonder, he had to secure funding from German and Swiss television after the French network refused to support an exercise as unpalatable as this, and a French release was made finally possible at a small left bank theatre thanks to Truffaut. This engrossing work – its colossal runtime notwithstanding – was a complex, multi-perspective investigation into the puppet, autocratic and collaborationist regime that was helmed by Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, which made France the sole occupied country during WW2 that had a functioning government that actively cooperated with German occupiers. Ophüls documented this dark chapter through an assemblage of diverse personal testimonies, memories and reflections – perpetrators, apologists and bystanders, as well as heroes, dissidents, and those who realized their folly on hindsight; fascists and antifascists; French people, of course, but also former Wehrmacht officers and British agents – which made this a simultaneously lucid, desolate and devastating oral history. Broken into two halves – “The Collapse” covered France’s rapid surrender, armistice, the disgraceful Vichy government, and how most people were okay with it; “The Choice” focussed on the active and passive collaborators, fearless members of Resistance groups, and the murky liberation process – its most unforgettable section comprised of a freewheeling conversation with working-class former Resistance fighters who melancholically share how easily everyone had embraced virulent racism, anti-Communism and xenophobia, the associated moral rot, the futility of seeking revenge against informants, and the eventual whitewashing of wartime culpability.

Director: Marcel Ophuls

Genre: Documentary/War

Language: French/German/English

Country: France