The last great voice of wartime European cinema has gone with the death of documentary film-maker Marcel Ophuls, son of director Max Ophuls; he was born in Germany, fled to France with the rise of Hitler, fled again to the US with the Nazi invasion and then returned to France after the war. He therefore had an almost ideal background for a nuanced, detached perspective on the impossibly (and enduringly) painful subject of French collaboration with the Nazis during the second world war.
This was the basis of his four-and-a-half hour masterpiece The Sorrow and the Pity from 1969, commissioned by French TV (which refused to screen it); however, it gained an Oscar nomination and its international reputation grew from there. The film was in two parts, The Collapse, about the invasion, and The Choice, about the factional splits on the subject of resistance. It was an unflinchingly tactless and powerful look at what amounted to France’s traumatised recovered memories.
For decades since 1945, France had been content to see its wartime self as martyred and embattled, enduring occupation as a tragic reversal, an almost spiritual ordeal like the trial of Joan of Arc. And for the most part, its former allies gallantly participated in this view – especially the British, who for all their Churchillian euphoria, were quietly aware that if things had gone differently, they too might have collaborated with the invader. One of the most remarkable parts of The Sorrow and the Pity is the interview given on the subject in fluent French by Anthony Eden (who audiences might have then known chiefly as the prime minister who partnered with the French over the Suez fiasco). Ophuls shows him as genial, clubbable, worldly and rather melancholy.
The film, and Ophuls, punched a hole through France’s self-excusing myths and saw something nastier, shabbier, more political, more human: a society that embraced xenophobia and informing on your neighbours and in which antisemitism came to the surface. The Sorrow and the Pity takes its place with the great political movies by French directors: Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Raven (1943), Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien (1974) and, of course, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). The title of The Sorrow and the Pity is one of the most brilliant things about it; it is taken from a comment by a pharmacist interviewed by Ophuls who said these were the two emotions he chiefly experienced at the time. Really? Ophuls cleverly allows the audience to suspect that these were emotions experienced after, not during the Occupation, in which fear and rage and shame were perhaps stronger; sorrow and pity were the dramatic reflexes which France found to make the memories bearable and that pity has a fair bit of self-pity. But who can really tell?
Ophuls later won an Oscar for Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, his documentary portrait of the former head of the Gestapo in Lyon, and gained plaudits for films about the Northern Ireland Troubles, about the Bosnian war, and about the old East Germany; he had also been working on a project about Israel-Palestine called Unpleasant Truths. But his portrait of the wartime French mind is his masterpiece.
