The Sorrow and the Pity

The Sorrow and the Pity

Chronicle of a French town under the Occupation

A film by Marcel Ophuls (1971)

Instruction booklet for Week 8

Rationale
Explanation and preparation
What you need to know
Questions to consider
Roles and reading
Further reading

Rationale

In Week 8 we structure our seminar discussion around a role-play exercise based on the interviewees featured in Marcel Ophuls’ documentary film The Sorry and the Pity.

The objective of the role-play exercise is not to recreate the lives of these people, whether during the Occupation or during the making of the film. The aim, instead, is to foster understanding of their positions during the war and the ways in which they either defended or criticized the opinions they had held and action they had taken during the ‘dark years’, 1940-1944. You will be encouraged to think within the mental frameworks and experiences of your assigned roles, and to imagine what choices were possible for them under the Occupation.

What is role-play?

This role-play exercise will allow you to get inside the skin of the past by understanding the experiences and attitudes of a survivor of the Occupation. It is NOT a performance of acting ability, requires no dressing up, no props, no audience and NO THEATRICALITY. There is no stage: rather, you will conduct the exercise in the normal seminar setting merely as a different kind of structured discussion.

Why do role-play?

This exercise has been inserted into the seminar programme to liven up our regular format by giving your something different, and more fun, to do. In getting inside the skin of your interviewee(s), in empathizing with them and understanding their point of view, you will have a chance to explain that person’s motives and outlook to the rest of the group, thus increasing your level of tutorial participation. Secondly, you will effectively be engaging with primary source material (ie. The documentary itself), the very evidence that professional historians themselves explore in order to produce historical knowledge. Finally, you will understand how these interviews conducted in the 1960s illuminate the broader problem described by Henry Rousso as the ‘Vichy syndrome’, and you will consider how far this film can be viewed as a piece of revisionist historical interpretation.

Explanation and preparation

Each group member will choose an interviewee before we start watching the film and will have prepared for the role-play exercise in Week 8 by watching The Sorrow and the Pity from that man or woman’s point of view. You will be guided in this reading of the film by your reflection on the questions listed under your interviewee’s details in this booklet, and will come to the session prepared to describe and discuss how the interviewee experienced the war years and how they recall them in the late 1960s.

How will the role-play exercise take place?

I will introduce the session by describing the film and the context in which it was made, before calling upon each interviewee in turn to introduce themselves and to explain to the rest of the group how they experienced the war, and how they remember those experiences from the point of view of the late 1960s.

How do I prepare for the exercise?

You will:

• read this booklet in detail to understand the nature and point of the exercise
• watch The Sorrow and the Pity from your interviewee’s point of view
• be prepared to discuss and to answer, as outlined below, the particular questions pertaining to your role and the general questions to consider

What you need to know about The Sorrow and the Pity

Marcel Ophuls was born into a German Jewish family who settled in France in the 1930s, but who emigrated to the USA in 1941 in order to escape the consequences of the Vichy Jewish statutes. His father, Max Ophuls, had himself been a filmmaker. Ophuls junior filmed the interviews for Le Chagrin et la pitié in 1969, and the film was financed by Swiss and German television companies. Indeed, the film was intended for French TV station ORTF, but the director-general of the station refused to show it on French television on the grounds that it ‘destroyed myths that French people still needed’. Perhaps coincidentally, Ophuls had been sacked by ORTF for his part in the disturbances of May 1968. The film was, in the end, released in art-house cinemas in Paris, where it ran for 87 weeks and played to some 600 000 people. The controversial film had found an audience.

Ophuls set out to make a film about the memory of the Occupation, rather than a film about the Occupation period itself. The film is essentially a tissue of interviews conducted in and around the central city of Clermont-Ferrand, quite close to the town of Vichy. The interviewees range from a former prime minister to male or female members of the anonymous ‘masses’. The richness and structure of the interviews suggests that for Ophuls and his associates the film intended to capture the relationship of these men and women to their wartime past. The title is derived from the words of ‘Français moyen’, bourgeois pharmacist Marcel Verdier, who uses the words to describe the emotions elicited during the years of the Occupation. His own experience of the Occupation was not marked by overt political choices: his world remained the private life of his family and the problem of feeding his children.

Despite its success, the film remained controversial, and was criticized by those on the Right and Left for its apparent challenge both to the Pétainist myth of the Vichy ‘shield’ and to the Gaullist – and communist – myths of the resistance. Conservative former collaborator Alfred Fabre-Luce was hostile to the film’s anti-Pétainism, yet liberal politician, Simone Veil, criticized the film for showing a cowardly and selfish nation. Indeed, the interviewees included former collaborators like Laval’s son-in-law René de Chambrun and the enigmatic LVF volunteer Christian de la Mazière, who reminded the audience of the fact that not everyone had accepted the authority of de Gaulle and the resistance movements. The testimony of Jewish resister Claude Levy demonstrates Vichy’s complicity in the deportations of Jewish children from France. Yet other critics, and historians, admit that the film is squarely on the side of the Resistance and remains judgemental of collaborators like René de Chambrun, who is not portrayed in a flattering light. The resistance Grave brothers, on the other hand, emerge as heroes. How far did this film really represent an attack on the notion that France remained a ‘nation of resisters’ during the Occupation?

Whatever the nature of its revisionism with respect to the Resistance, The Sorrow and the Pity paints a clearly judgemental picture of the Vichy regime, and, for its deportations of Jews in particular, shows the bankruptcy of the notion that Vichy was ever a shield for the French population. At the time of its release, the only comprehensive history book that focused on that troubled period was Robert Aron’s The Vichy regime (1954) which offered a defense of the Vichy regime’s role in protecting the French masses from greater German brutality.

This documentary is frequently hailed as perhaps the first concerted attempt to revise the historical understanding of what Vichy and the Resistance had entailed in France, and to lay bare the paucity of discussion ever since where the complexity of that time was concerned. Whether or not The Sorrow and the Pity was the first such work of revisionism, the years that followed witnessed the publication of several history books and feature films that represented deliberate attempts at revisionism. No longer was popular discussion silent on the issue of the complexity of the Vichy period. On the contrary, according to Henry Rousso, a ‘forties revival’ or ‘mode rétro’ marked the 1970s cultural scene. That interest in the Vichy past was not limited to the entertainment industry. Historians (such as Robert Paxton) and lawyers (such as Serge Klarsfeld) published the fruits of research into the ways in which the Vichy regime had openly collaborated with the Germans and, in particular, had participated willingly in the Holocaust.

How convincing is Rousso’s argument about the pervasiveness of this revisionist ‘mode rétro’? If such a phenomenon did indeed exist, what forces precipitated it? Rousso himself wonders how far de Gaulle’s own death in 1970, the shifting boundaries of discussion after the events of May 1968, and generational change may have driven such a revisionist impulse. Protest posters issued during the events of May 1968 had certainly aired a criticism of the processes by which information, of any kind, was passed on to the public, and a criticism of the ways in which the state had control over that information. It is significant that it was the state-owned television channel, ORTF, that had effectively censored the interpretation of the past offered by The Sorrow and the Pity by refusing it to be broadcast on French television. More recently, critics of the film have wondered why the role of women during the Occupation was marginalized in the documentary: the only female interviewee is Mme Solange, the hairdresser, who is associated with a kind of petty collaboration. Gender historians like Siân Reynolds have seen this absence of women as symptomatic of a more general sidelining of women in French historical constructions of the past. Even though women played a role on the barricades of May 1968, for example, their activities have often been overlooked in reports of those events, or reduced to women’s decorative role.

Questions to consider

• Why was the film controversial upon its release in 1971?
• Why was it not shown on French TV until 1981?
• How does the film pose a revisionist interpretation of the war years?
• Who was Marcel Ophuls?
• Does the film suggest that France was a ‘nation of resisters’ or a ‘nation of collaborators’?
• How does the film illuminate the ‘Vichy syndrome’?
• How is de Gaulle portrayed in the film?
• How is the Vichy regime portrayed in the film?
• How are Germans portrayed in the film?
• Why were former collaborators interviewed for the film?
• How are women portrayed in the film?
• How are class issues portrayed in the film?
• How do the interviewers in the film make implicit judgements of their interviewees?
• How does film function as a ‘vector of memory’?
• Can a film every render a historical account with integrity?
• How can the historian use film as primary source evidence?

Roles and reading

Core reading

The only piece of core reading is Stanley Hoffman’s introductory piece, entitled ‘In the looking glass’, which appears in the English translation of the screenplay: M. Ophuls, The Sorrow and the Pity: chronicle of a French city under the German Occupation, (1972), pp. vii-xxvi. You might find it useful to follow the film by browsing the English screenplay itself. Several copies are available from the tray outside my office door, all of which also contain Hoffman’s introduction. You need do no further reading, but biographical information on the politicians that feature in the following list can be found widely in textbooks on the period, such as those by Julian Jackson or Maurice Larkin.

1. Georges Bidault

Why was Bidault interviewed in the film?

What role did he play in the Resistance?

What post-war activity was Bidault involved in?

How does Bidault describe his wartime experiences?

What is the interviewer’s attitude to Bidault?

1. Comte René de Chambrun

Why is de Chambrun interviewed in the film?

How is de Chambrun interviewed in the film?

What was de Chambrun’s position during the Occupation?

How does he describe his wartime experiences?

Does he defend or criticizehis position during the war?

What has his post-war life been like?

1. Jacques Duclos

Why is Duclos interviewed in the film?

How is Duclos interviewed in the film?

What has Duclos being doing since the war?

How did Duclos experience the Occupation?

How does Duclos describe his Occupation experiences?

1. Alexis and Louis Grave

Why are the Grave brothers interviewed?

What is the attitude of the interviewers to them?

What is the role of the women in their household during the interviews?

What have they done during the war?

How do they recall and defend those experiences?

1. Georges Lamirand

How is Lamirand interviewed during the film?

Why do you think the filmmakers included him?

What did Lamirand do during the war?

What has his post-war activity been?

How does he recall and defend his wartime experiences?

1. Claude Levy

Why is Levy’s testimony included in the film?

How is Levy interviewed?

What did Levy do during the Occupation?

How does Levy recall and defend those experiences?

1. Christian de la Mazière

Why is de la Mazière’s testimony included in the film?

How is he interviewed in the film?

What did de la Mazière do during the war?

How does he remember and defend those experiences?

1. Pierre Mendès-France

Who is Pierre Mendès-France?

Why is he interviewed in the film?

How is he interviewed in the film?

How does Mendès-France recall and defend his activities during the war?

What was his activity under the Occupation?

1. Madame Solange

Why is Mme Solange interviewed for the film?

How is she interviewed?

What had she done during the Occupation, and since?

How does she remember and defend her experiences?

1. Marcel Verdier

Why is Verdier interviewed for the film?

How is he interviewed for the film?

What was his political and social experience of the war years?

How does he remember and defend his experiences?

1. Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie

Why is d’Astier interviewed for the film?

How is he interviewed?

What did d’Astier achieve during the Occupation?

How does d’Astier de la Vigerie remember and defend those experiences?

How does he describe the resistance?

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