The Sorrow and the Pity
Director Marcel Ophuls
Countries Switzerland, Germany, France
Duration 251 min
Synopsis
"The Sorrow and the Pity" is the result of the questioning of a widely held belief – that every man, woman and child who lived in Nazioccupied France either joined the Resistance or helped it. Ophuls turned his attention to a single French town – Clermont-Ferrand – and interviewed those residents who remembered and who would speak, as well as government officials, writers, artists, and a stray German veteran or two. We learn about the way people behaved and how they rationalized their behaviour; and our assimilation of these facts, each and cumulatively, results in a staggeringly clear and powerful portrait of how real human beings behaved in the most demanding of circumstances. Ophuls invites us to continually try to place ourselves in the positions of these witnesses; we try to imagine what we would have done under the same circumstances." ( Elliot Wilhelm, "Video Hound’s World Cinema", 1999)
"The Sorrow and the Pity" is the result of the questioning of a widely held belief – that every man, woman and child who lived in Nazioccupied France either joined the Resistance or helped it. Ophuls turned his attention to a single French town – Clermont-Ferrand – and interviewed those residents who remembered and who would speak, as well as government officials, writers, artists, and a stray German veteran or two. We learn about the way people behaved and how they rationalized their behaviour; and our assimilation of these facts, each and cumulatively, results in a staggeringly clear and powerful portrait of how real human beings behaved in the most demanding of circumstances. Ophuls invites us to continually try to place ourselves in the positions of these witnesses; we try to imagine what we would have done under the same circumstances." ( Elliot Wilhelm, "Video Hound’s World Cinema", 1999)