The Sorrow and the Pity

Rating:
Summary: The Greatest Films Don't Need "Extras"
Review: ... this is one of the greatest films of all time. The DVD features a decent transfer; the film looks better than it has in decades. The quality of that transfer, and the brilliance of the film itself, more than justifies the cost. ...Lesser movies can be improved through DVD extras; a great movie like this one can stand on its own.

Rating:
Summary: 60 Years Ago
Review: 60 years ago France negotiated a peace with Hitler and the country was split: Germany occupied the north while Petain's collaborationist; puppet government installed itself in the South. France was the only conquered country in WWII to have established a collaborationist government. To further disgrace herself in defeat, she was proactive in Hitler's Final Solution by instituting the same anti-Semitic policies as had been enacted elsewhere in Hitler's Europe and in sending thousands of French citizens to death camps. How could this have been possible? Is one man to blame? Hitler? Petain? Or is an entire nation guilty? While most of France sat idly by, small groups of patriots-risking death, torture, and deportation--formed resistance factions within France to combat the Nazi propaganda and even undermine German military strength with sabotage and assassinations. These "terrorists" as the German's called them, sacrificed everything for their ideals. While the experience of World War II and the evils of Hitler have been recorded in countless mediums,The Sorrow and The Pity is one of the most important if for no other reason than because there is a sense in our (American) society that war is fiction. It is almost absurd to think of one's homeland being invaded--even occupied--by another country. Surely, our civilization has moved beyond the barbarism of those days! Watch this documentary and try to understand, because these events are not fiction. They really happened. It was only 60 years ago.

Rating:
Summary: France under Nazi occupation and the lessons of appeasement.
Review: After the terrorist attacks on American soil of September 11th 2001, the question of how do we as a nation respond to enormous evil, is no longer hypothetical, or avoidable. There are important lessons to be learned from Marcel Ophuls 1969 documentary masterpiece, The Sorrow and the Pity, Chronicle of a French City Under the Occupation. This film, combining archival footage with firsthand accounts of the occupation, gleaned from interviews conducted 25 years after the end of World War II, and punctuated ironically with the singing of Maurice Chevalier, provides us an essential perspective on that shameful period in French history. Ultimately this is a cautionary tale about the moral price of a nation's appeasement. This DVD contains the restored version of the film, which is apparently 251 minutes, not 260 minutes as stated in some movie guides. The DVD unfortunately, has no extras, not even alternate audio tracks in English or other languages. And the English subtitles are on the film, when they should have been a menu option, along with other languages. I presume this failure to fully take advantage of the possibilities available in the DVD format, was the decision of Woody Allen, who presents this restoration of The Sorrow and the Pity.

Rating:
Summary: France under Nazi occupation and the lessons of appeasement.
Review: After the terrorist attacks on American soil of September 11th 2001, the question of how do we as a nation respond to enormous evil, is no longer hypothetical, or avoidable. There are important lessons to be learned from Marcel Ophuls 1969 documentary masterpiece, The Sorrow and the Pity, Chronicle of a French City Under the Occupation. This film, combining archival footage with firsthand accounts of the occupation, gleaned from interviews conducted 25 years after the end of World War II, and punctuated ironically with the singing of Maurice Chevalier, provides us an essential perspective on that shameful period in French history. Ultimately this is a cautionary tale about the moral price of a nation's appeasement. This DVD contains the restored version of the film, which is apparently 251 minutes, not 260 minutes as stated in some movie guides. The DVD unfortunately, has no extras, not even alternate audio tracks in English or other languages. And the English subtitles are on the film, when they should have been a menu option, along with other languages. I presume this failure to fully take advantage of the possibilities available in the DVD format, was the decision of Woody Allen, who presents this restoration of The Sorrow and the Pity.

Rating:
Summary: The Pity of Francophobia
Review: As the review by Stephen Cramer reveals, this movie is the perfect feast for pitiful Francophobes. Vague and biased references to history will allow them to "feel good" and make a deeply entrenched racism concerning the French (or "the French character") look more palatable.
Thus, the following "enlightened" considerations on France by Monsieur Cramer, in which the [German]Occupation, Greenpeace and the UN security council fit in the same sentence!
Marcel Ophuls would never have guessed.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing. This film will astound you.
Review: I have watched other films/documetaries about WWII, but this film gives you the story from a unique angle - from the point of view of the French people who were under occupation. We hear accounts from people of all walks of life, describing their situations and circumstances and how the events affected them. Some contradict others, but taking the movie as a whole, you get a pretty accurate account of what life was like.Highly Recommended.

The price of the DVD may seem a little off putting, but unfortunately, due to its limited availablity, it seems the only way to see it is to buy it. Do what I did, buy it, watch it, then sell it on.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant look at the ordinary French views
Review: I saw this film in a theatre when it was first released. It was shown on alternate days. I'm sure that seeing it on a "big screen" was more gripping than on a normal TV. Any study of French history, beginning with and before the Dryfus(?) Affair knows how deeply ingrained the anti-semitism was in France. Even the United States, when FDR turned away a boatload of Jews from our shores to return to Germany, where they were all murdered, did so partly to satisfy American anti-semites (and himself). Many of the people's mixed feelings show the Germans were doing the thing they didn't have the guts to do themselves. This is a great film for the depth it probes into the French people. At the same time, brave Frenchmen put themselves in great danger to help the Jews, so this is an indicment of a national attitude, not its entire population. The fortune that the French gov't has made in recent years selling weapons to Arab nations while voting against anything for Isreal show that things haven't changed much in 60 yrs. I grew up in Minn., where Minneapolis was, with great justice, called the anti-semitic capital of America--something I saw with my own eyes.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant look at the ordinary French views
Review: I saw this film in a theatre when it was first released. It was shown on alternate days. I'm sure that seeing it on a "big screen" was more gripping than on a normal TV. Any study of French history, beginning with and before the Dryfus(?) Affair knows how deeply ingrained the anti-semitism was in France. Even the United States, when FDR turned away a boatload of Jews from our shores to return to Germany, where they were all murdered, did so partly to satisfy American anti-semites (and himself). Many of the people's mixed feelings show the Germans were doing the thing they didn't have the guts to do themselves. This is a great film for the depth it probes into the French people. At the same time, brave Frenchmen put themselves in great danger to help the Jews, so this is an indicment of a national attitude, not its entire population. The fortune that the French gov't has made in recent years selling weapons to Arab nations while voting against anything for Isreal show that things haven't changed much in 60 yrs. I grew up in Minn., where Minneapolis was, with great justice, called the anti-semitic capital of America--something I saw with my own eyes.

Rating:
Summary: Scalding Remembrance of French Betrayal
Review: I was a little daunted at watching "The Sorrow and the Pity" because it is four hours long, and in "Annie Hall" Woody Allen presents this movie as a sort of dour duty that you have to sit through to prove your own ethical hardiness. It turns out that this landmark documentary is as gripping and riveting as any fine fictional film, because it handles its thorny issues with great skill and is as carefully crafted and filmed as a Hollywood thriller. I wonder how much Ken Burns was influenced by it, because it seems to be a sort of forerunner of his work; that is, documentaries that are planned and executed as art, not just as reguritation of stale facts.

Ophuls talks to many French and Germans who lived during the time, and who either resisted the Nazis or gave into them. (It's a little aggravating that on the DVD there are no titles to identify who is speaking; you have to piece together who said what from a close reading of the closing credits.) People were more innocent 30 years ago about appearing before a camera and they maybe weren't as aware of just how revealing about themselves it could be. Thus you get interview subjects like Laval's nephew, and the former German officer at his child's wedding, and the aristocrat who joined the Waffen SS, who inadvertently disclose their opportunism or self-deception or venality or cowardice. The clips from now rarely seen propaganda films that Ophuls uses are mesmerizing. During the scenes from the anti-Semitic "Jud Suss" you get a feeling of palpable evil as you view just how the Nazis prepared their subjects for the coming holocaust.

Ophuls prsents Vichy as a colossal moral failure by the French people, a collapse of character that haunts them to this very day. (Ophuls couldn't get French financing for the film, and then state-run French television refused to show it.) He shatters forever the myth that all the French were in the Resistance. "Sorrow" and "pity" are the very words one uses to define "tragedy"; "tragedy" is the word you must use to describe the French experience of World War II. This film is a solemn reminder of the dangers of appeasing or collaborating with fascism, and it's more relevant than ever.

Rating:
Summary: A historical document rather than a work of history
Review: In the early 1970's Marcel Ophuls' film The Sorrow and the Pity replaced the old Gaullist notion of widespread resistance, and cultivated the impression that the French may well have been a "nation of collaborators". The film has had a profound impact in France and the English-speaking world. Since then, however, historians have come to a much more balanced assesment of what things looked like in occupied France. They have also found many mistakes, even fabrications, in Ophuls'reporting in the city of Clermont-Ferrand. Sadly, none of their work is to be found in the DVD which offers no bonus.
The Sorrow and the Pity is still a brilliant documentary (although Ophuls' best work remains "Hotel Terminus"), but one should pay a close look at a great companion book "Choices in Vichy France: The French Under Nazi Occupation" by John F. Sweets (Oxford University Press, 1994), available from Amazon.
Here's from the book description:
"From evidence gathered in France, Germany, and England, John F. Sweets has produced an insightful reappraisal of French life during the war at Clermont-Ferrand, the largest town near the occupational capital of Vichy, and the very setting of The Sorrow and the Pity. Having thoroughly examined town archives, records, and manuscripts, the author reconstructs occupational commerce, education, media, and attitudes, maintaining that, contrary to popular opinion, the vast majority of French were far from collaborationist. Choices in Vichy France details the effects upon society of war, oppression, internment, rationing, aryanization, and propaganda, painting a portrait of the wartime French that lies somewhere between the extremes of outright resistance and enthusiastic collaborationism. With illustrative examples of what day-to-day life was like in the region for the German, the Jew, the Communist, and the fascist, as well as the French masses, this provocative book opens a remarkably clear window onto an era of history often fraught with misunderstanding and suspicion."

In a similar vein, there is "The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews" by Susan Zuccotti (Univ of Nebraska, 1999).