THE SORROW AND THE PITY Movie Review

Marcel Ophüls's great 1971 The Sorrow and the Pity is the result of the questioning of a widely held belief—that every man, woman, and child who lived in Nazi-occupied France either joined the Resistance or helped it. Ophüls turned his attention to a single French town—Clermont-Ferrand—and interviewed those residents who remembered and would speak, as well as government officials, writers, artists, and a stray German veteran or two. What Ophüls found has rewritten modern history, and changed forever the way we think of and understand the issues of collaboration and resistance, specifically as they apply to one particular nation at one particular moment in time. The Sorrow and the Pity is four-and-a-half hours long, and unfolds at the breathless pace of a great thriller. In fact, it is a great thriller. We learn bits and pieces about the way people behaved and how they rationalized their behavior; and our assimilation of these facts, each and cumulatively, results in a staggeringly clear and powerful portrait of how real human beings behaved in the most demanding of circumstances. Needless to say, not everyone was a hero. But Ophüls's intelligence and craft invites us to continually try to place ourselves in the positions of these witnesses; the more we hear the more we try to imagine how we would have behaved—what we would have done under the same circumstances. The Sorrow and the Pity opens our eyes and our minds in ways that predigested, pat documentaries cannot. It leaves us with more questions than we had when we went in, but feeling more wide awake—and more aware of the power and responsibility we each possess—than we have ever been. Exhilarating in its impact even though so much of what it shows us is appalling, The Sorrow and the Pity takes its place among the most valuable achievements in the histories of cinema and journalism. (As a gauge of the “infallibility” of the Academy Awards, you might want to know that The Sorrow and the Pity lost the Best Documentary award to The Hellstrom Chronicle, a science-fiction movie about bugs that was completely scripted and staged—a “mockumentary.” Bet you haven't heard of it lately.)

NEXT STOP … The Memory of Justice, Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, The Troubles We've Seen

1971 265m/B FR D: Marcel Ophuls. VHS COL, OM