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The Sorrow and the Pity
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The Sorrow and the Pity is a two-part documentary film by Marcel Ophüls that concerns the French Resistance and collaboration with the Vichy government and Nazi Germany during World War II. This 1969 film used interviews of a German officer, collaborators, and resistance fighters from Clermont-Ferrand. They comment on the nature and reasons for collaboration. The reasons include anti-Semitism, anglophobia, fear of Bolsheviks and Soviet invasion, the desire for power, and simple caution.
One of the film, The Collapse, has an extended interview with Pierre Mendès-France.
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Encyclopedia
The Sorrow and the Pity is a two-part documentary film by Marcel Ophüls that concerns the French Resistance and collaboration with the Vichy government and Nazi Germany during World War II. This 1969 film used interviews of a German officer, collaborators, and resistance fighters from Clermont-Ferrand. They comment on the nature and reasons for collaboration. The reasons include anti-Semitism, anglophobia, fear of Bolsheviks and Soviet invasion, the desire for power, and simple caution.
Synopsis
Part One of the film, The Collapse, has an extended interview with Pierre Mendès-France. He had been jailed by the Vichy government on charges of desertion, but escaped from jail to join Charles de Gaulle's forces operating out of England, and later served as Prime Minister of liberated France. The center of Part Two, The Choice, revolves around Christian de la Mazière, who is something of a counterpoint to Mendès-France. Whereas Mendès-France was a French Jewish political figure who joined the Resistance, de la Mazière, an aristocrat who embraced Fascism, was one of 7,000 French youth to fight on the Eastern Front wearing German uniforms.
The film shows the French people's response to occupation as heroic, pitiable, and monstrous, sometimes all at once. The post-war humiliation of the women who served (or were married to) Vichy men perhaps gave the strongest mix of all three. Maurice Chevalier's 'Sweepin' the Clouds Away' is the theme tune of the film.
The film is referenced in Woody Allen's film Annie Hall and in the Angel episode Conviction.
Interviewees
Persons interviewed for the film
Persons present or speaking in archival footage
Production
Release
This film was first shown on French television in 1981 after being banned for years. It is frequently assumed that the reason was French reluctance to admit the facts of French history. While this may have been a factor, the principal mover in the decision was Simone Veil, later a minister and the first President of the European Parliament, and a former (Jewish) inmate of Auschwitz, on the grounds that the film presented too one-sided a view.
Reception
TIME magazine gave a positive review of the film, and wrote that Marcel Ophüls "tries to puncture the bourgeois myth—or protectively askew memory—that allows France generally to act as if hardly any Frenchmen collaborated with the Germans." It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
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