Film Review
By any standards,
Le Chagrin et la pitié is a monumental piece of film documentary.
For one thing, it dares to make an objective assessment of one of the most difficult periods
in France's history - the German occupation of that country during World War II.
In addition to being one of the most important documentaries ever made, it is also one
of the most compelling and well-made, despite its modest style.
The film combines shockingly frank interviews with players in the drama with archive footage
(mainly newsreel excerpts). Although the film is nominally centred around the town
of Clermont-Ferrand, it does go further afield, venturing to Paris, rural France, Germany
and London. Through its very simple documentary style and a plethora of material
(not a minute of the film's four and half hours is wasted),
Le Chagrin et la pitié
conveys a very real sense of what it must have been like to have lived through the
Occupation. It is a profound, enlightening and thought-provoking piece of work.
The film was directed by Marcel Ophuls (son of the great German film director Max Ophuls)
whose investigative documentaries earned him international acclaim. It was originally
commissioned by the French television channel, ORTF, as part of a series of three films
about recent French history. When its producers André Harris and Alain de
Sédouy were dismissed from the channel for participating in the political uprisings
of May-June 1968, Marcel Ophuls had to turn to a German television company to finish the
film. Ironically, it was with German money that
Le Chagrin et la pitié
was completed.
When the ORTF refused to broadcast the film, its first public airing was in a small Parisian
cinema in April 1971. The film immediately unleashed a storm of controversy and
was condemned vociferously as being unpatriotic. In particular, many saw it as a
direct assault on the government of General de Gaulle, since it significantly diminished
the role of the general during World War II. The film continued to be shown at specialist
cinemas and film festivals throughout the world and was nominated for an Academy Award
(in the "best feature documentary" category) at the 1972 Oscars. It was not until
1981 that the film was shown on French television, when it attracted an audience of 15
million viewers.
Le Chagrin et la pitié is a film in two parts. The first part (
L'Effondrement
) shows how a France which was divided politically and socially proved to be an easy
conquest for the almighty German war machine. Fearful of losing their wealth
and status, and also seeing fascism as an effective counter to communism, the bourgeoisie
offered up no resistance, and, for them at least, life went on much as before. For
the working classes, it was a different story. With political parties and strikes
outlawed, workers' rights no longer existed and most ordinary people lived under repression.
As the film makes clear, the main concern for most people during the Occupation was simply
having enough food to eat.
France was not just divided socially - it was also divided physically. The northern
and western parts of the country were directly controlled by the Nazis, whilst the south
was governed from the town of Vichy by a puppet president, Marshal Philippe Pétain,
and his prime minister, Pierre Laval. Most French people seemed prepared to
accept the situation and responded positively to Pétain's trite mantra:
Travail,
Famille, Patrie.
In the second part of the film (
Le Choix), which looks at the last two years of
the Occupation, we see how growing distrust and resentment germinated into opposition
and created a growing resistance movement. Whilst scores of French men and
women risked their lives to free their country, others became ever more complicit in Nazi
activity, denouncing their own neighbours, supporting the anti-Jewish purge and enlisting
in the German army.
Most of the material in the film consists of interviews (most of which were conducted
by Ophuls), making this a very personal and vivid account of the Occupation.
The recollections of the film's contributors are obviously tainted by their experiences
and, for many, it is apparent that the wounds have yet to heal - in spite of the fact
they are recounting events which took place almost thirty years before. As the accounts
are sometimes contradictory and often have a strong personal bias, this patchwork quilt
of revelations forms a very complex picture, suggesting that any simple assessment of
the Occupation would be both both flawed and unjust. In an archive clip, Anthony
Eden (British Prime Miniser after the war) eloquently states that no one who has not been
confronted with the threat of invasion from an overwhelming enemy can condemn the French
for their capitulation. However, it is hard not to be moved by the testimony of
some of the film's contributors and we are ultimately led to cast judgement - not on the
French nation as a whole, but on individual men and women who were galvanised to perform
acts of great evil, or great good.
By allowing the villains and heroes of the piece to speak freely, the film gives a more
graphic and forceful account of events than will ever be divined in any history book or
wartime drama. The film begins with a stomach-churning interview with a high-ranking
Nazi officer, who apparently still sees himself as a member of the Super Race and has
no qualms of his participation in the Holocaust (to the point of not understanding why
his fellow countrymen have such misgivings about the period). In another chilling
interview, aristocrat Christian de la Mazière candidly tells André Harris
how, as a young man, he was seduced by fascism and became one of the 7000 Frenchmen to
sign up for the Charlemagne division, a special SS unit assigned to the Eastern Front.
On the side of the heroes, a farmer, Louis Grave, gives a solemn personal account of the
work he and his brother did for the resistance. Grave was denounced by a neighbour
and ended up in a concentration camp; his bitterness is still apparent 25 years on.
A British spy, Denis Rake, movingly recounts the extreme generosity of ordinary French
people he saw whilst he was serving in France; by contrast he received next to no support
from the bourgeoisie. Pierre Mendis-France (who became Prime Minister some
time after the war) talks at length about his opposition to the Vichy regime, which led
to his imprisonment; he managed to escape to England when he joined the Free French forces.
Surprisingly, there is very little mention of De Gaulle's movement, La France Libre, which
took control of France after the Liberation by the allies in 1944, but which had very
little support in France during the Occupation. De Gaulle claimed that his
movement played a key role in the resistance, something which the film seems to take issue
with.
The film ends with an archive extract in which popular singer Maurice Chevalier attempts
to justify a concert he gave in Nazi Germany. He claims, in English, and without
a great deal of conviction, that he was there not for the benefit of German troops but
merely to entertain French prisoners of war. With brutal irony, this sequence
succinctly sums up how much of the French nation must have felt about the Occupation -
an overwhelming sense of guilt, self-admonishment and naïve optimism that it could
be put behind them and forgotten. The fact that the many contributors in the film
still felt so strongly about events which took place nearly thirty years in the past suggests
that the incident could not be so easily swept under the carpet. It is evident that
the wound would take many more decades to heal and, even then, a unpleasant stain would
remain, etched into France's collective memory for generations to come.
© James Travers 2003
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Next Marcel Ophüls film:
Ain't Misbehavin (Un voyageur) (2013)