-Caveat Lector-
>>>I'm forwarding these articles not so much because I advocate the
perspectives but because of the treatment of the historical subject
matter. It's interesting to look at accepted history from a
different point of view. When I was at Buchenwald (not as an
inmate), I saw a sign left over from the Honniker dayze that esteemed
the Communists for their struggles against the Nazi fascists.
Interesting how in the West, it was about contra-Hebraism and in the
East they had a slightly different point of view, politics not
religion. A<>E<>R <<<
>From www.wsws.org
WSWS : Arts Review : Film Festivals
Sydney Film Festival 2001
Collaboration and resistance in Vichy France
The Sorrow and the Pity directed by Marcel Ophuls
By Richard Phillips
16 August 2001
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The Sorrow and the Pity: Chronicle of a French City Under Occupation,
Marcel Ophuls� four-and-a-half-hour epic on Germany�s World War II
occupation of France, was screened at the recent Sydney Film
Festival. First shown 30 years ago in Paris, the film, which has now
been re-released on DVD, is rightly regarded as one of cinema�s more
significant documentaries and one of the few that uncovers the French
ruling class�s collaboration with Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1944.
Ophuls� film not only exposes the political repression and anti-
Semitism in Vichy France and growing opposition to the regime, but it
also questions the postwar mythology created about Charles de
Gaulle�s Free French movement. Although not a full record of the
period, and there are some significant omissions, the film is a
remarkable introduction to these times.
Marcel Ophuls, the only son of film and stage director Max Ophuls and
actress Hilde Wall, was born in Germany in 1927 and lived through
some of the period covered by the documentary. Ophuls� family moved
to France in 1933, where his father continued to direct films, served
in the French army as a private from 1939-40 and was also involved in
producing anti-Nazi radio broadcasts. The family fled Paris in 1940,
just days before German troops took over the city, travelling to
Spain and then making their way to the US in 1941.
Marcel Ophuls returned to France with his parents in 1950 and worked
as an assistant director on John Huston�s Moulin Rouge (1953) and his
father�s Lola Mont�s (1955). After some unsuccessful features in the
early 1960s, Marcel turned to documentaries and made Munich or Peace
in Our Time (1967) and The Sorrow and the Pity (1969). He followed
this with The Harvest of My Lai (1970), about the Vietnam War; A
Sense of Loss (1972), on the Northern Ireland conflict; and The
Memory of Justice (1976), which deals with the Nuremberg trials,
French colonial rule of Algeria and US intervention in Vietnam. After
a 12-year break from filmmaking he made Hotel Terminus: The Life and
Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), which won an Academy award, November
Days (1992) and more recently The Troubles We�ve Seen: A History of
Journalism in Wartime(1994).
The Sorrow and the Pity is divided in two and mainly focuses on life
in Clermont-Ferrand, a town of 150,000 close to Vichy in the Auvergne
region. The first part, The Collapse, roughly sketches the political
crisis of the French bourgeoisie�its military disintegration in the
face of the German army and the division of France into two
territories, the Occupied Zone and the so-called Unoccupied Zone. The
Choice, the second half of the film, deals with opposition to the
regime, its eventual disintegration and defeat.
The Occupied Zone was directly ruled by the Nazis and covered the
whole of the Atlantic and Channel coasts, including all the richer
areas of western, northern and northeastern France. The Unoccupied
Zone, which was governed by a pro-Nazi Bonapartist regime headed by
Marshall Philippe P�tain, a French World War I officer, with Pierre
Laval as prime minister, controlled central, southern and
southeastern France. The Nazis, according to P�tain and his
supporters, were defenders of civilisation against communism. The
central slogan of P�tain�s government was �Work, Family, Country�.
Using in-depth interviews of contemporary participants�36 in
all�combined with newsreel and archival footage to either underline
or contradict their testimonies, The Sorrow and the Pity builds up a
mosaic-like portrait of the period. Those interviewed, many of them
by Ophuls himself, include members of the German military, French
collaborationists and fascist-minded aristocrats, liberal democrats,
English diplomats and spies, factory owners, fence-sitting members of
the middle class, teachers and shopkeepers as well as peasant members
of the Resistance.
The film begins with a cigar-smoking Helmut Tachsend, a former
Wehrmacht captain and a member of the occupying force, who claims
that French people welcomed the Nazis with open arms. Interviewed at
his son�s wedding, Tachsend boasts about his wartime exploits. The
documentary cuts between Tachsend and Nazi propaganda newsreels
denouncing France as a �disgrace to the white race� because it had
Vietnamese and African soldiers in its army.
Archival footage, including speeches by P�tain and Pierre Laval, is
used with comments from collaborators who candidly tell Ophuls that
they supported P�tain because they believed that he would crush
communist militants, stop working class unrest and guarantee a strong
position for France in a new German-dominated Europe. By contrast, a
lower-ranking German soldier tells Ophuls later in the film that he
was relieved when the Nazi armies were defeated. �If Hitler had won,�
he says, �I would probably still be a soldier today, occupying
Africa, America or somewhere else.�
French anti-Semitism and political repression
Apart from some minor disruptions in the first weeks of the German
occupation in June 1940, social life for the Parisian bourgeoisie and
upper middle classes resumed as usual�fashion shows, theatre, opera
and horse racing. As one of those interviewed explains: �The city was
a wild and crazy place and Maxim�s did great business. Everyone is
ashamed to say it today but life in Paris was great.�
Against this backdrop Ophuls charts the wave of Nazi government and
Vichy regime repression unleashed against masses of ordinary people.
Political parties were banned, strikes outlawed, and thousands of
socialist-minded workers, Jews, Gypsies and refugees from fascist
Spain were witchhunted, imprisoned and then transported to German
concentration camps. Pseudo-scientific race theories and anti-Semitic
propaganda, including the French-produced film Le P�ril Juif,
depicting Jews as sub-human, were promoted throughout the country.
One of the interviewees, Claude L�vy, who has written one of most
complete accounts of Jewish persecution in France and was an active
member of the Resistance from the age of 16, provides details on the
infamous Velodrome d�Hiver events in mid-July 1942, when French
police rounded up nearly 13,000 Parisian Jews�including 4,051
children�and jailed them in the d�Hiver cycling stadium. Five days
later, these prisoners were loaded onto cattle cars and transported
to Drancy concentration camp just outside Paris and then to the
Auschwitz death camp. In fact, French officials deported some 75,000
Jews, including 12,000 children, to Nazi camps between 1941-44, where
they were executed.
Many of those interviewed, however, feign ignorance or memory loss
when questioned by Ophuls about these events. Prime Minister Laval�s
son-in-law maintains that his father-in-law opposed racism while two
teachers who lived through these events claimed that they could not
remember any laws banning Jewish teachers from French schools. Ophuls
interviews Marius Klein, a French shopkeeper who, fearing boycotts,
fire bombings or deportation, maintained an advertisement in the
local paper for the duration of the Occupation declaring that he was
not Jewish.
Ophuls� documentary also has brief footage of Jacques Doriot, a
former French Communist Party (PCF) leader who was elected to the
Chamber of Deputies but broke with the organisation in 1934 and went
on to form the extreme rightwing French Popular Party in 1936. Doriot
supported the Nazis and collaborated directly with the German
occupying force.
Towards the end of The Sorrow and the Pity, Andrew Harris, one of the
film�s producers, conducts a chilling interview with Christian de la
Mazi�re, a French aristocrat and fascist thug. De la Mazi�re was one
of 7,000 Frenchmen who enlisted in the Charlemagne Division, a
special German SS unit assigned to the Eastern Front. De la Mazi�re
explains that although infatuated by the mystical and religious
components of fascism, its main attraction for him was its
determination to stamp out all socialist organisations and ideas.
�You have to understand France at the time when I was growing up,� he
explains. �In 1934 every school was a battleground with talk of
revolution everywhere�France, Spain and North Africa. We had to
choose between one or another revolutionary party and my
revolutionary party was fascism. How could a boy raised from my
background, not be an anti-communist?�
The Sorrow and the Pity pays little attention to Charles de Gaulle�s
Free French movement, the force created by a small group of French
ruling class elements opposing the Nazis. In postwar France, de
Gaulle and the Free French movement were promoted as the leading
figures in the anti-Nazi resistance but contrary to the official
government version, De Gaulle, who fled to Britain in June 1940, had
little popular support within France. Apart from limited backing from
French colonial governors in Syria, Madagascar and Algeria, the self-
appointed leader was almost entirely dependent on the British and US
military.
Rather than directly exposing the de Gaulle mythology, Ophuls
highlights the self-sacrifice and heroism of ordinary workers and
peasants who battled the German military and the Vichy regime with no
outside assistance for years. De Gaulle only briefly appears in
newsreel footage and none of the Resistance members interviewed have
any connection with him or the Free French movement. The film also
includes scathing remarks by Resistance members against bourgeois
elements who later falsely claimed to have fought the fascists.
Denis Rake, a British spy and nightclub performer operating in Paris
during the occupation, explains: �I was given no assistance by the
French bourgeoisie [at this time] but workers gave us everything we
needed. Food, cigarettes and even the shirts off their backs if we�d
asked.�
Louis Grave, a peasant farmer who ran a local Resistance unit with
his brother Alexis from their cellar, gives a self-effacing but
deeply moving account of his underground activities. Grave was
betrayed by a local villager, captured by authorities and sent to
Buchenwald concentration camp. Local Resistance fighters gathered in
Grave�s farmhouse kitchen describe the repression and torture
unleashed against friends and family suspected of opposing the
fascists. These unassuming heroes tell Ophuls they felt no desire to
exact revenge on those who collaborated or betrayed Resistance
members to the authorities�the central issue, they explain, is to
ensure that similar forces do not emerge again today.
The Sorrow and the Pity concludes with archival footage of
entertainer Maurice Chevalier attempting to justify a musical
engagement in Nazi Germany. You must understand, he declares, before
bursting into a rendition of Sweeping the Clouds Away, that this
visit was not to entertain German troops but to �cheer up� French
prisoners in a concentration camp. The effect is chilling.
Ophuls� film denounced as �unpatriotic�
The Sorrow and the Pity provoked a storm of controversy in France. It
was originally planned as the second in a three-part television
documentary on contemporary French history, but ORTF, the government-
controlled broadcaster, refused to screen the film when it was
completed in 1969. The film was not released until April 1971, almost
two years later, when it was shown at a small cinema in the Latin
Quarter of Paris.
Like much of the artistic work produced in the aftermath of May-June
1968 student revolt and general strike, Ophuls� film sought to
undermine the political credibility of Charles de Gaulle�s rightwing
government and his claims to have led the Resistance. As Andrew
Harris later explained: �What irritated me was not the Resistance but
resistancialism, which, though it misrepresented the reality of
history, nevertheless littered literature, film, casual conversation,
and children�s textbooks.�
In fact, Ophuls and the documentary�s producers�Andrew Harris and
Alain de S�douy�who actively supported the May-June 1968 movement,
had clashed with ORTF management during the strike and were dismissed
from the network before the completion of The Sorrow and the Pity.
Ophuls went to work for German television and the film was finalised
with Swiss and German financing.
Gaullist politicians and sections of the French intelligentsia were
outraged over the movie and denounced it as �unpatriotic�. ORTF
network chief Jean-Jacques de Bresson, a former Resistance member,
told a government committee that the film �destroys myths that the
people of France still need�.
One alarmed critic declared that the film undermined France�s
attempts �to regain her rank� and that �any wallowing in shame, any
prolonged and extensive purges aimed at weeding out all those who in
any way had done wrong, would only have served the designs of those
among France�s allies who wanted to relegate her to a minor role in
the postwar era�.
The danger was, he continued, �foreign audiences, especially in
nations that have had reasons to resent French post-war actions, or
to suspect that the Official Version is a whitewash, will accept only
too willingly The Sorrow and the Pity as the real and whole truth.�
The documentary, however, screened for 87 weeks in Paris and was
widely shown at film festivals and in serious cinemas in Europe and
the US throughout the decade. The Sorrow and the Pity�s intimate on-
location interviews and the restrained and often-ironic use of
archival footage influenced a new generation of documentary and
feature filmmakers. In 1981, more than a decade after it was made,
Ophuls� film was finally broadcast on French television where it
attracted an audience of 15 million viewers. Serious omissions about
the role of Stalinism
Some cautionary remarks, however, need to be made about Ophuls�
documentary. The film does not explore two central issues: Why was
there no initial mass working class resistance to the German
occupation? Why were Charles de Gaulle and his rightwing Free French
movement, which had little popular support in France in the early
1940s, able to take state power following the collapse of the German
occupation?
These questions cannot be answered without examining the role of the
French Communist Party (PCF), something that Ophuls� documentary does
not do and which leaves the door open for pessimistic conclusions.
One critic, for example, has claimed that The Sorrow and the Pity
proves �the all-too-human ability to abandon morality when military
force and propaganda make it convenient to do so�.
In fact, the German occupation of France and the emergence of the
Vichy regime were not the result of �human flaws� but the end product
of the counter-revolutionary policies pursued by the Stalinist
bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and its satellite organisations in
France and elsewhere, which strangled independent action against
fascism by the working class.
In the aftermath of Hitler�s rise to power in Germany in 1933�made
possible by Stalin�s policies that divided and paralysed the German
working class�the Soviet bureaucracy openly allied itself with
Germany�s imperialist rivals. In order to prove themselves to their
new partners, the Stalinists suppressed the revolutionary struggles
of the working class in country after country.
Socialism was taken off the agenda through the Popular Front policy,
adopted in 1935 by the Communist International, which subordinated
the working class to alliances with various bourgeois political
parties. Under this banner, the Spanish revolution and the struggle
against Franco�s fascists in the 1930s was sabotaged and betrayed.
In France, the Communist Party urged workers to support the Popular
Front government that came to power in May 1936, which was headed by
Socialist Party leader Leon Blum and included the bourgeois Radical
Party under the leadership of �douard Daladier. Claiming that this
regime represented a �lesser evil�, the PCF leadership undermined
mass strike action and occupations by French workers in June and July
1936 and a general strike in November 1938. In this revolutionary
situation, the Stalinists opposed any struggle by the working class
for its independent interests and created widespread political
disorientation.
The defeats of the working class only strengthened the hand of
reaction. In France, Daladier, previously hailed as a progressive by
the Stalinists, became prime minister in 1938 and began reversing the
gains won in the 1936 strike movement. Daladier�s government attacked
the trade unions and accommodated itself to those seeking a
rapprochement with the Nazis.
Far from reversing its disastrous policies, the Soviet bureaucracy
sought to preserve itself by reaching a deal with Hitler�a step that
paralysed any struggle against fascism and led directly to World War
II. On August 21, 1939, the Soviet bureaucracy concluded the German-
Soviet mutual defence agreement�the infamous Stalin-Hitler
pact�declaring that Hitler�s Germany was a friend of the USSR.
Communist parties around the world, including the PCF, endorsed this
policy and instructed members to oppose any imperialist war waged
against Germany.
This ensured that when Hitler�s troops took control of France in June
1940 there was no organised working class resistance. The PCF,
although operating underground, having been illegalised in September
1939 by the Daladier government, made no attempt to oppose the
occupying forces or the Vichy government. In fact, the PCF denounced
de Gaulle from a rightwing standpoint for collaborating with the
British.
The PCF took no serious interest in the Resistance until a year later
in June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The Stalinist
bureaucracy, having previously characterised Britain and the US as
enemies of the USSR, suddenly redefined these imperialist powers as
allies. The PCF began collaborating with de Gaulle�s forces and
directed their cadre to join the Resistance, taking control of the
most important organisations. In the months before D-Day, the PCF
dominated the six-man National Resistance Council (CNR), the
Committee for Military Action (COMAC), and the steering committees
for the Liberation of Paris (CPL).
Although socialist-minded workers in France saw the collapse of the
German occupation as an opportunity to put an end to capitalism, the
PCF had other plans. In line with guarantees given by Stalin to the
US and Britain at the 1943 Teheran Conference, which organised the
political shape of post-war Europe, the French Stalinists helped
hoist de Gaulle into power and then contained and disbanded the
Resistance. In exchange, the French Stalinists were given leading
ministerial positions�including production and labour, national
economy and defence�in de Gaulle�s first postwar government.
As de Gaulle later admitted in his memoirs, PCF leader Maurice Thorez
�helped put an end to the last vestiges of the �patriotic militia�
whom some people obstinately sought to maintain in a new underground
... [and] among the workers he did not stop advocating the slogan of
working to the utmost and of producing, cost what it might�.
Despite its failure to analyse these critical issues and therefore
present a complete picture of this period, The Sorrow and the Pity is
still a valuable record of life in German-occupied France and a
useful starting point for future documentary filmmakers attempting to
analyse this crucial period. It certainly deserves much a wider
audience than those able to attend film festivals.
Copyright 1998-2001
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
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