Le Chagrin et la pitié

(1971)

   Film. Marcel Ophuls shot his four-hour documentary, Le Chagrin et la pitié, for television in 1969. However, it was banned by government censors and not televised until 1981. The documentary was released in theaters in 1971, and it is one of the only made-for-television documentaries to have had a theatrical release. Ophiils's damning portrayal of France during World War II motivated both the film's censorship and its ultimate success. Because of its fairly explicit depiction of French collaboration with Germany, French Anglophobia, and French anti-Semitism, Le Chagrin et la pitié became a landmark film about the German Occupation and one of France's most important documentaries of the twentieth century.

   Le Chagrin et la pitié focuses on the memory of the Occupation by the inhabitants of the French city of Clermont-Ferrand, which is located near Vichy. The film is based on interviews conducted in the late 1960s with figures such as a German colonel, leaders of the Resistance, peasants, elites, fascist sympathizers, Jews, British diplomats, and Nazis, including Hitler's interpreter. The film also relies heavily on period newsreel footage and clips from propaganda films.

   As part of the Mode Rétro, Le Chagrin et la pitié presented a direct challenge to France's postwar image of itself. It questions specifically the idea that France was, from the beginning, a nation unified in its resistance to the German Occupation. A number of critics have pointed out that the film's effectiveness was not in its presentation of new ideas, but in its articulation of what French citizens already knew, but had in many ways repressed, about their history.

   Historical Dictionary of French Cinema by Dayna Oscherwitz & Mary Ellen Higgins