The Sorrow and the Pity: Marcel Ophüls

Marcel Ophüls's The Sorrow and the Pity is a towering, exhausting work of documentary that stands alongside Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1956) and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) as one of the seminal cinematic texts on Nazism during World War Two. But while those two latter films focused on the Holocaust, The Sorrow and the Pity turns to a less clear-cut subject: the Nazi occupation of France. During Ophüls' dizzying arrays of interviews with survivors, instigators, and bystanders, he portrays a populace equally--if not more--eager to collaborate and ignore the Germans than to actively resist them. The general theme emerges that people will do anything to justify their own comfort, even if it involves turning a blind eye to an occupying force that executes innocent people in the streets. Horrifying. Necessary. Essential.

Rating: 9/10