Word: douy
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...followers, Charles de Gaulle was nothing less than "twice the savior of his country," and even today the Gaullists are reluctant to entrust the telling of the precious legend to anyone who might tamper with it. Nobody knows this better than French Film Makers Alain de Sédouy and André Harris, who (along with Director Marcel Ophuls) collaborated in 1969 on the superb documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, an exhaustive and exhausting (4½-hour-long) study of a French city under the Nazi Occupation (TIME, March...
...years ago, they set out to make another mammoth chronicle, this time of the entire De Gaulle era. "We were exasperated by the veil of veneration thrown over him," says De Sédouy. The two soon ran into a Gaullist resistance as stubborn and iron-willed as that of the General himself. De Gaulle's son Philippe refused to see them, telling friends that everything must be done to stop a project that could "only denigrate" his father. The state television network, ORTF, which holds a monopoly on World War II newsreels as well as postwar TV newsclips...
After that, De Sédouy and Harris were all set to release their picture-except that the country's two principal film distributors, Gaumont and Pathé, reversed an earlier decision and refused to book it. They were afraid, explained one distributor, that the film "would provoke public disorder...
What were the film makers trying to prove? "The French are the victims of the sin of self-satisfaction," says De Sédouy. "They believe strongly in the responsibility of others, not in their own." Says Harris: "We hope that the film will upset people, will cause intellectual agitation. Our view of how the French have behaved in the past half-century is pessimistic, but nothing proves that they won't change...
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