Word: clermont
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...SORROW AND THE PITY is an immense and truly extraordinary testimonial to humanity's infinite potential to do good or evil, but mostly to do nothing. In its four and a half hours it explores the effects of the Occupation on the French city of Clermont-Ferrand: its citizens and the outsiders who touched it, famous and not, French and foreign. It rediscovers the truths which lurk beneath the myth of French resistance, exposing the very ugly fact that collaboration and not resistance dominates the story. That this weakness is not exclusively French but characteristically human reinforces the horror...
...Sorrow speaks with a very personal voice. It deals primarily with ordinary Frenchmen and Germans who have reduced the Holocaust to forms of individual and family history. Helmuth Tausend, a German officer stationed in Clermont-Ferrand, first speaks of the war as a six-year separation from his new bride. Marcel Verdier, a pharmacist, refers to the obsession with food he and his countrymen developed. Pierre Mendes-France, who was Secretary of State before the collapse, recalls both matters of government and of the desire for small needs like kitchen matches. Those who struggled against the Nazis give personal, seemingly...
...Sense of Loss starts out as a straightforward documentary appraisal of the situation in Northern Ireland. Marcel Ophuls' monumental previous film. The Sorrow and the Pity, (TIME, March 27), brought shape and great emotional resonance to the memories of citizens of Clermont-Ferrand during its occupation by the Germans in World War II. A Sense of Loss shows the same extraordinary compassion for people, the same rare gift for making political history real in immediate human terms. The dilemmas of occupied France emerge more clearly after nearly 30 years than do the problems of a divided Ireland, which still...
...Clermont-Ferrand, a middle-size Auvergnat city not far from Vichy, gradually emerges as Ophuls' microcosm for Occupied France. The film never stops shifting from then to now, with dramatic scenes often commented upon retrospectively by generals and statesmen who took part. But the camera returns again and again to a cast of Clermont-Ferrand residents, presenting their painful, fragmented, cumulative remembrance of things past. Mendès-France was imprisoned in the city before escaping to join De Gaulle. He discusses the convulsions of Anglophobic, anti-Semitic and antidemocratic feeling that after the debacle helped Frenchmen blame everyone...
...either way in a private crisis. One Resistance hero is proudest not of his deeds but of the fact that in the underground he lived for the first time in a classless society. Another remembers that he was pricked toward action because the Germans got all the steak in Clermont-Ferrand restaurants...