Word: clermont
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls' documentary cross-section of Clermont Ferrand residents who lived through Occupied France, is, in the final analysis, a noble failure. It brings us up close to varying degrees of complicity and guilt and some causes for it, but the sheer bulk of its interviews and newsreel clips not only occasionally deadens, but gives the audience a misconceived faith in the completeness of Ophuls' very selective vision. Documentary talents like Ophuls' are hard to find, however, and they're needed desperately to slake a thirst for social commentary rarely touched by fiction filmmakers...
...string of fine films booked into the Harvard Brattle chain. An already legendary 1970 documentary by Marcel Ophulus (son of Max) it examines life in WW 11'S occupied France with a Collection of interview with national leaders, spies and various inhabitants Of the industrial city of Clermont-Ferrand. The historical view the film Presents may be fragmentary, even misleading; but the human range covered is Powerfully complete. We not only hear heroic, week, tragic actions explained, but get some inkling of what these actions meant to the rest of the lives of the participants...
...there are the Great Men. Churchill, de Gaulle, Petain, and especially Hitler loom up before the Clermont-Ferrand landscape. But they, too, exist as personalities in individual memories: Hitler is recalled as favoring "harmless little liaisons" over inter-marriage, claiming that his soldiers' desire to marry French women was caused "by lack of sexual opportunities." Those famous men who are interviewed, Anthony Eden and Pierre Mendes-France in particular, speak more of the times than of great events. Mendes-France, recalling his escape from prison, is reminded of the modesty of a young woman whose boyfriend propositioned her as they...
...content and the speakers are illuminated. The sense of the collapse grows; from the newspaper headlines, to Mendes-France's account of becoming a political scapegoat, to a former French soldier's remembered sense of bewilderment, to the reactions of the Germans, to the recollections of the citizens of Clermont-Ferrand, culminating in the newsreel of Marshall Petain 'offering his person' to France as he surrenders her to Germany. As the scratched words of the newsreel play on. Ophuls alternates between the aging Frenchmen of the present to the faces of the past...
Emile Couladon, Colonel "Gaspar", relatesnow customers will come into his store and claim to have been in the Resistance. As local head of the Resistance, Couladon knows they are deluding themselves, but what the hell, and challenging them would hurt business. Some of the citizens of Clermont-Ferrand said that they saw no Germans in their town in 1942. There were...