‘It destroys myths that the people of France still need’ was the verdict in 1969 on The Sorrow and the Pity of Jean-Jacques de Bresson, the head of the government-run television station ORTF, which having helped to produce the four-and-a-half-hour, black-and-white documentary, then refused to screen the completed version. A chronicle of life in the town of Clermont-Ferrand, near Pétain’s Vichy regime, during the years of German occupation, The Sorrow and the Pity was released at a Parisian Left Bank cinema in 1971 before going on to enjoy wider distribution in France and abroad. (In Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), one of the gags is that it’s Alvie Singer’s choice of date movie.) It was not until 1981 that it was finally broadcast on French television.
The Sorrow and the Pity systematically dismantles the cherished myth of universal resistance. Ophüls and his co-producers Andre Harris and Alain Sedouy interviewed numerous ‘ordinary’ citizens from Clermont-Ferrand, quizzing them about their choices and compromises during those traumatic years. Alongside footage from Vichy and German propaganda reels, which demonstrate how mainstream entertainers such as Maurice Chevalier had embraced Pétain’s cause, we hear the testimonies of an impressive array of witnesses. (One of the clips has Chevalier singing the hit song of 1942 ‘Life’s so good in France’, and he even pops up in a post-war sequence to reassure us that he’s not dead and that he didn’t collaborate.) Amongst the interviewees are the shopkeeper Klein who took out an advert in a local newspaper to declare that he wasn’t Jewish, and the farmer Louis Grave who was sent to a German concentration camp because of his activities in the Resistance, but who refused to take revenge on his return. There’s the female hairdresser Madame Solange whose head was shaved in punishment for alleged collaboration, and the pharmacist Monsieur Verdier who remembers the food shortages.
One is shocked by how unreliable people’s memories are: a pair of teachers claim not to have seen any German soldiers in Clermont-Ferrand, and nor do they recall any of their own students joining the Resistance, despite a visible memorial plaque within the school grounds. They then backtrack and say that they thought it only applied to people killed in World War 1. Ophüls is a patient, probing interviewer and the often uncomfortable body language of his subjects allows us to speculate further as to the veracity of their statements. He also selects some telling locations in which to conduct the interviews. He talks to French aristocrat Christian de la Maziere, a veteran of the French Charlemagne division who fought with the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front, in a sumptuous palace given to Pétain by Hitler when the former was fleeing France at the end of the war. And a cigar-chomping Wehrmacht Captain, Helmuth Tausend, remembers his time in Clermont-Ferrand at his own daughter’s wedding. Proudly wearing his military medals, he offers no remorse.
The Sorrow and the Pity doesn’t ignore the tensions between Communist and Catholic members of the Resistance and the evidence of former Prime Minister Pierre Mendes-France indicates how popular feelings of anti-Semitism and anti-Communism were exploited by the Pétainist government, which carried out wholesaled deportations of Jews from France. The Jewish scientist Claude Levy details the shocking details behind the Velodrome d’Hiver raid of July 1942, where French police rounded up some 13,000 Parisian Jews (including over 4,000 children) and despatched them to internment camps and then to Auschwitz.
Throughout The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophüls cleverly elides the distinction between present and past. Monsieur Verdier and his children gather round in their sitting room in 1969, whilst on the soundtrack we hear Pétain’s infamous armistice radio broadcast, in which he offered France “the gift of myself”. Daringly, observes Austin, [19] Ophüls even establishes a visual parallel between Pétain and de Gaulle, choosing to end Part 1 with an image of the collaborationist Pétain, and to complete Part 2 with footage of de Gaulle at a victory parade, both shots accompanied by Chevalier’s jaunty singing.
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