The New Yorker:

Marcel Ophuls’s 1969 film about France’s collaboration with German occupiers during the Second World War broke a quarter century of media silence.

By Richard Brody

All films relate to their place and time, but some are nearly incomprehensible out of context. That’s the case with Marcel Ophuls’s great 1969 documentary, “The Sorrow and the Pity,” even though its story is well known. The two-part, four-hour film, which is streaming on ovid in a new restoration and is also available on Milestone and Kanopy, is about the Second World War in France, focussed on life in the small city of Clermont-Ferrand, in the center of the country. It covers the German invasion and the Occupation of France; the formation of the Vichy regime, just twenty-nine miles from Clermont, under Marshal Philippe Pétain; the rise of the French Resistance; and the Liberation in 1944 and its aftermath. What has made those facts familiar is, in significant measure, the film itself: it’s a work of history that changed the course of history, and its impact on its moment is exemplified in the opposition that it faced and ultimately overcame.

In “The Sorrow and the Pity,” Ophuls—making his first feature-length documentary—tells a vast and intricate story in a form that now seems classical, even hackneyed. It’s composed mainly of interviews with a wide-ranging group of participants and witnesses to the events. Ophuls cuts the material into interview bites and assembles them to develop the story’s arc; the interviews are punctuated with illustrative archival footage. As familiar as the format is now, when Ophuls made “The Sorrow and the Pity,” few documentaries of note were constructed in this way. Extended on-camera interviews depended on portable synch-sound equipment that was developed only in the late nineteen-fifties, resulting in Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s “Chronicle of a Summer” (the film for which Morin coined the term “cinéma-vérité”), Robert Drew’s “Primary,” and such successors as the Maysles brothers’ “Salesman” and Frederick Wiseman’s “Hospital.”

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