The Sorrow and the Pity: Dismantling the Gaullist Myth | Dissident Cinema

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3:03What kind of a show are you guys putting on here today? You're not interested in art? No. Well, look, we're going to do this thing. We're going to have a conversation. Hey, film spotters, Adam and Josh here to discuss the fifth film, the penultimate film. And boy, was it a doozy in our dissident cinema marathon, Marcel Ophel's The Sorrow and the Pity from 1969. It is a chronicle of French collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II. It's probably worth reminding listeners that these film spotting marathons are all about eliminating our cinematic blind spots. We devote them to directors, actors, genres, or regions of world cinema.

3:47We've done more than 50 marathons over the years. This one, a little unique in that it has a thematic focus. This dissident cinema marathon is dedicated to films that depict or openly confront fascism of various kinds. So, yes, as Adam said, six films in all. If you want to look at that entire lineup and also find out where to watch some of these movies, go to filmspotting.net slash marathons. For the sorrow and the pity, Ophuls interviewed close to 50 residents of Clermont-Ferrand, a French city 200 miles south of Paris that very briefly served as the seat of the French government during Nazi occupation.

4:29I said it was a doozy. That is because in addition to its name, which suggests it might be a bit of a slog, it is almost four and a half hours long. We give gold stars out here on film spotting to any listener who does their homework and follows along, keeps up with the marathons. What do we do with listeners who watch the sorrow and the pity, Josh? Platinum? What's above a gold star? Sure. Platinum, you know, an extra recess, I think. Yeah. At least they deserve. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. It's a. We have one. I want to mention, Josh. Oh, good. I'm going to get us started here with Sam Oppenheim, who wrote in and said, it's real work and hard to watch in parts.

5:16Reminds me of Oppenheimer's film, The Act of Killing a Little. Very important historical documentary footage of recollection of truth as recalled by witness. Can't wait to hear your take. He says, I've watched every film in the marathon, so definitely deserves that platinum star. All borrows from the public library system. Well done. Started with The Circle, so that's our sixth film, then went in order a week behind you. Finally caught up now. On hour three, as he's typing, on hour three of four in Sorrow and the Pity, took me many days to get through it. So he says it's real work. Was it real work for you, Josh, and was it worth it?

5:54Oh, absolutely worth it. I should credit Wendy Fox Weber, another loyal listener, my former editor who talked to me at Film Spotting Fest. She had already done the homework and had seen it and said similar things about it being, in terms of the subject matter, a very heavy load, but a worthwhile one. Sam is dead on. The act of killing came to mind for me, as well as Oppenheimer's follow-up, The Look of Silence, and interestingly, Schindler's List as well, just in terms of so much debate about that Spielberg film and how it depicted Schindler. Was it too heroic of a depiction? What sort of collaboration that we saw there is justifiable?

6:39These are similar questions that are asked in the sorrow and the pity. I found this, Adam, to be a very harrowing watch. And we haven't been talking a ton in this marathon about the context and honestly the impetus for doing it is the political situation in the United States right now. We've touched on it here or there. This is the one that scared me the most, I will say, in that context. And maybe we will get to it, But I did appreciate the extensiveness of this. I think it needed all four hours and 20 minutes or so. I think the construction of it is quite ingenious in keeping not only our intention, but zooming in and out from as high up as the international diplomatic discussions taking place with representatives of England, to zooming back down to a farm in that specific town in France and the people who live there and what it was like.

7:46You probably needed this much time to be able to do both of those actions well and make use of the extensive archival footage that they collected for this. and so I did find it to be worthwhile on every front even as I'm sure at any time in history to watch it would be troubling and to watch it now is is manifestly a disturbing but necessary experience I think we will have to get into that at some point I had a very similar reaction to it it has been a little bit of an albatross this film even though it was one of the significant reasons z was there to the previous film we talked about this is one of the main reasons why i wanted to do this marathon i needed the push i needed to be forced to finally watch this movie in the length was really just the main reason it's hard to find two and a half hours much less four and a half hours and any film that is that long about a difficult subject, a complex subject, and doesn't offer a lot of context.

9:00And this is going to set up my point here. It is decidedly made, I would argue, for a French audience. Ophels here isn't trying to make it so an audience here 50 years later or whatever is going to be able to understand all of the transitions and have all the historical knowledge. He goes right to DeGaulle and starts throwing around names and just expects that the audience knows the significance of all of that. That said, I was surprised at the extent to which, Josh, it never felt like work. I'll admit, I broke it up into three parts, but I was always engaged and I was always eager to get back to it.

9:45I do want to say it is a little bit funny. I didn't know exactly what I was in for with this movie, and it was easier, I suppose. I'll say easier than I expected. My only knowledge of the sorrow and the pity comes from Annie Hall and Annie's line, Diane Keaton's line, the retort to Alvy, where, of course, he says early on, let's go see the sorrow and the pity. And she says something like, oh, Alvy, I don't want to go see a four hour movie about Nazis. My brain always assumed that when she says a four-hour movie about Nazis, that meant a four-hour movie about the Holocaust. And while, of course, the Holocaust does come up, of course, that's not really what this movie is about.

10:30Something that we've never discussed behind the scenes as an approach to this show and our conversations, our reviews, it was always just organic. For these marathons, but really just any review, is how we're 99 to 100 % focused on what's on the screen. And we don't really get into production history or historical slash cultural context. For us, for better or worse, it's always about taking the movie as we see it and what we can glean from what's on the screen and the choices being made. and here between segments, and I don't even remember how I learned it. I learned something extra textual that I thought, oh, this is going to have to factor into our conversation.

11:20This will have to be acknowledged when talking about the power and importance of this film. This is a lens this film will have to be viewed through. And then in the last hour of the movie it becomes textual you you understand the project you understand why this movie is being made and why it is decidedly for a french audience ultimately and this is why i learned later this movie was so controversial upon its release and apparently banned josh i did know this that it was banned on TV for a long time in France. Right. Ophuls uses the documentary form to force a national reckoning. The sorrow and the pity is, is an essential reminder of how easily a country, not just an individual or group can rationalize and deny its own complicity.

12:17And again, I thought that was maybe that was the subtext, but early on in the film, it's It's not entirely clear, at least to an outsider like me in 2026, that that's what the effort is here. But in the last third or so of the film, you know, that's exactly what he is doing. And that's where the movie becomes extra powerful. That's where it really does take on even greater meaning and understanding that Ophels did have an agenda here. as objective as he may or may not have been as a filmmaker in letting these talking heads when they're posed his questions letting them contradict each other as he does and letting them talk as objective as he may or may not be he nevertheless had an agenda and that was to get this on the historical record and understand that france as a country had completely mythologized its role during the war.

13:24And he felt like he had to do something about it. And boy, did he succeed. It absolutely has that strain in it. I thought of the documentarian Michael Moore. This does not have the showmanship or the playfulness or the use of humor, but there is a gotcha quality absolutely to this documentary, Adam. And there are, I'm thinking of a couple of occasions, they're interviewing a shopkeeper about his time during occupation and why he placed an ad in the newspaper explicitly stating that he wasn't Jewish. I don't remember what business he ran. And they're having a conversation, a casual conversation, asking him about this.

14:07He seems completely oblivious as to why they would ask until they push a little further. Well, tell us why you felt the need to explicitly state that. And eventually he blurts out, listen, I've never been a racist. I mean, at the point you're saying that to a camera, there are real problems, right? Sure. And so I also think of the conversation with a couple of retired school teachers, which begins, again, casually. And what happened to your colleagues, your Jewish colleagues during occupation? And well, you know, they were fired. And then a little more pressing of a question, did you ever collectively organize to protest that?

14:50And they pause and look at each other. And one of them says, well, we got them tutoring jobs. And there's a phrase, Adam, one of them says, which I wrote down, when they're asked how they felt about it, they said, a certain amount of sympathy. How about that? And that's chilling. Yeah. That's chilling because that's us. That's, again, I'm not going to jump to where we are in the U.S. today quite yet, but I fear that do I see myself there if pushed against the wall under that situation, which we're inching closer, would I be content and feel good about myself to only offer a certain amount of sympathy?

15:34and I think you're right about the agenda as a good thing for this movie I think there's another quote someone says we need to set the record straight and interestingly the person who says that maybe we'll come back to doesn't necessarily interested in setting the record straight the way we think he means it but that is the project of this movie and so while I agree with you it was meant for a specific time and a specific audience. I think this is why it is also timeless because it is a historical document that did set the record straight that we can now watch, point back to about that era and apply to whatever era we happen to be in, in the political realities of that, that day.

16:22Um, and so, yeah, I do, I do think the value of this movie is timeless in this sense of this documentary, it also made me feel preemptively long for a day we're already in this fast coming, Adam, where we're not going to have historical documents in terms of digital images, which basically in terms of captured images like this anymore, right? With the manipulability of images now. There is a future where there's no possibility of a sorrow and the pity, because even if someone has the convictions to make it and does so honestly and truthfully and uses historical footage in this way, we're fast approaching a moment where no one's going to believe it.

17:15And I felt grateful to be able to look amidst all of the suspicious imagery we swim in today. This isn't to say everyone producing images is dishonest or suspicious, but we're swimming in that sort of stuff today. This is a treasure in the sense that we can verify it, right? We can verify the interviews and we can verify the archival footage, which is both coming from the German regime, the propaganda they were producing, what the French government was producing to justify the collaboration. There is propaganda from those groups as well, which was fascinating to see. And yeah, part of me just kind of longed for, was sad about the loss of that, which were fast approaching.

18:07Yeah, absolutely. To build off of all of that, you're watching this film even early on before, as I said, it becomes very clear that he's asking direct questions about involvement or lack of involvement in the resistance. And he wants to know how people feel about that. And he's asking people very profound, troubling questions like, how does it feel to know that you live next to your neighbors are people who denounced you, right? It's that kind of tension that Ophels wants to investigate here. Even before that, you're watching this film. It's almost all talking heads mixed with newsreel footage or archival footage.

18:53We're covering all this historical ground, right? 20, 25 years old at this point, who did what, when? Obviously it's important, but you might be thinking to yourself, is it, is it urgent? And the answer is yes. Yes. Because even Ophuls then forget now, even though, yes, I agree with you. The further they got from the war, what Ophuls recognized was the more the French people were exonerating themselves. And not only that, they weren't just exonerating Josh, the more they were mythologizing, they were bolstering the image of themselves and their courage. And if you think about it, how susceptible your line that line that you mentioned about a certain amount of sympathy.

19:45If you were someone who was ashamed, if you did, even if you didn't actively, it wasn't a sin of commission actively collaborate, but a sin of omission, you went along with it. And then someone like De Gaulle comes along and says, you know what? No, you didn't. You resisted. France was unified. You know what? We're all heroes effectively. You're telling me you're not going to listen to Charles DeGaulle telling you you were heroic and you're going to believe what you want to believe. And that's what they did. They bolstered this image of themselves and their courage. And not only do you have that urgency that was happening then, but as I said, the further they're getting away, the more that's growing.

20:38And then you have one of the most eloquent speakers in the movie who Opals does come back to regularly. He was the colonel in the resistance. And I believe he's the one who says, I wrote it down, I think there's a risk in the world of the reappearance of Nazism. You want to talk about a red flag or a warning going off and you thinking about relevance. That had to be something else as well that Ophuls had on his mind, recognizing that we had to shatter this myth about French pride, about the resistance. And here again, we have to have a historical record. you may think do i want to watch just talking head after talking head well we need the witnesses we need the participants we need their voices and it's not about ovals contextualizing it for us or providing his version or the right version of the record there is this dialectical approach where there are going to be contradictions sometimes the footage is going to contradict what someone just said.

21:50It's up to us. It's up to the viewers to reconcile that tension. That's what's really essential to this film. And I'll say, Josh, I think it's similar to what a film I thought about a lot, and this isn't really a surprise, of course, is The Zone of Interest and Jonathan Glaser. Because what I think this movie also makes us consider is the human capacity to look past evil. It's one thing to have people, and this movie does document this as well. It's one thing to have people, we know these people exist, and they're deplorable. People in any culture who during wartime are going to look to profit from it, or people like the doctors we hear about, who when they saw an opportunity, they ratted out other doctors who were Jewish because it meant they could steal their, they could poach their patients.

22:46Okay. We know there are people like that. And like I said, they're obviously awful. What's more fascinating and in a way unsettling to me is how so many people, it's not just complacency. It's how so many people felt the need to establish normalcy. to do anything they could to distract themselves from the horrors around them. When you hear one character at one point mention how, this is where zone of interest comes in, mention how Buchenwald had a theater, had a brothel. Because the Nazis, they need their own distraction from the horrors. But Paris too, there's significant mention of how Paris during the occupation, all these terrible things happening how many festive events there were how the bourgeoisie they they probably partied according to this movie even more than they did before they had even more reason it seemed josh to dress up and go out and have a good time because it allowed them to distract themselves from what was really happening and one guy in the film it's that I think we may only see him once.

24:02He's an English man. They say he's got a theater background. He's the guy who has the cat who comes up at one point. He says one of the most poignant lines in the movie. One of the most poignant lines I've heard anybody say in terms of summing this up, summing this reality up, the ability for humans to do this. He says the reality with the bourgeois is that he finds that people often think about they get too preoccupied with what they can lose. Yes, that that more to lose. And so that becomes the only thing they care about is what they can lose. And they will then do anything to not lose it. And you may say if you're listening to this, well, yeah, that that makes sense that that's not that deep.

24:54okay it it something about that when i heard him say it just the the pithiness of it it was so perfect it made perfect sense to me in that moment this is chelsea handler from dear chelsea every week the news gets worse the world gets crazier and yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible you're the problem if you come over here to play games i'm gonna check you okay if If you do some in the news that don't sound good, I'm a play you. Join Yamanika Saunders as she breaks down the week's most problematic stories on her new podcast. You're the problem with Yamanika. Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was?

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29:06Listen to Sweet 305 with Lele Pons as part of my Cultura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to come back to that idea of just wanting life to be as normal as possible under these conditions because I think it's key. I did find in my notes, though, who said we need to set the record straight. And I want to bring him to the forefront because he's such a fascinating character and speaks to your point about we're not just seeing interviews with good guys or bad guys or however you want to draw this line, right? So this is Christian De La Mazier.

29:39I knew it had to be him. You were thinking. Yeah. Right. Because he's a former Nazi guy. Yeah. But he's French, right? This is a Frenchman. And he's being interviewed multiple times. We see him very genial, very agreeable, happy to talk, not happy, willing, like openly willing to talk about this. Right. And yes, he, in the waning days of world war two joined the Nazis to fight with them. And I believe on both fronts, he was sent back and forth. And so, you know, he's, he yet is recognizing at some level, the importance of Ophel's aim of this movie's aim. He says, we need to set the record straight, but he kind of shrugs his shoulders about his choices and his experience and says something about how he got caught up in the propagandistic fervor of the Hitler regime.

30:27He has some very telling things to say about our time in terms of how he both, I think it's him or someone. Anyways, the point both laughed at the propaganda and was a little drawn to it. I think that's absolutely what we've got going on right now. How many people voted for where we're at because they thought he was funny? Anyway, they like this trolling. You're right. Yes. Love the trolling. So De La Mazier, he's talking about his experience of, you know, fighting for the Nazis. Now he's, I think he did end up serving some time for something. and again he's just acknowledging that yeah you know maybe i made some wrong decisions but not the gravity of it these are the sort of confessions and put that in air quotes if you want that are all across the documentary and are endlessly fascinating because they reveal the complications of the human conscience and rationalization and for me then two frightening realities emerged from that adam and this will get around to what you're just talking about the first is historical that i did not have an understanding that a significant portion of the French population was deeply sympathetic to the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic agenda of the Third Reich.