Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity is a veritable chorus of disparate voices and striking faces, exquisitely juxtaposed in a way that challenges the once widely accepted notion of a strong, resistant France in the face of evil. This prismatic examination of the citizens of the small central French city of Clermont-Ferrand and their German occupiers features testimonies of integrity and betrayal, courage and indifference, capturing the full spectrum of the human condition within a fascinating microcosm of opposing forces.
Interviews with everyone from British secret agents and French resistance fighters to neutral citizens and Nazi officers provide an exhaustive, often contradictory, and always enlightening account of the years of the Nazi occupation of France and its aftermath that speaks to the factions and perspectives at play both during and after the war. Ophüls, though, is less interested in providing an overview of this historical period than he...
Interviews with everyone from British secret agents and French resistance fighters to neutral citizens and Nazi officers provide an exhaustive, often contradictory, and always enlightening account of the years of the Nazi occupation of France and its aftermath that speaks to the factions and perspectives at play both during and after the war. Ophüls, though, is less interested in providing an overview of this historical period than he...
- 6/1/2023
- by Derek Smith
- Slant Magazine
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