Word: sorrowful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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SEVERAL YEARS AGO Marcel Ophuls's documentary film The Sorrow and the Pits reopened the painful subject of French behavior during the German occupation. The national collapse of 1940 represented to most Frenchmen a devastating indictment of their government and society. Consequently, in the process of national reconstruction after the war, nationalist politicians sought to project an image of a heroic France united behind de Gaulle and the Resistance Ophuls attempted to show that this image was a self-serving myth, since the Resistance never comprised more than a tiny fraction of the population, which for the most part collaborated...
Since the release of The Sorrow and the Pity, the moral and social issues raised by the occupation have become a focus of discussion in French political and cultural life, inspiring a series of films, most prominent of which is Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien Treating the problem of individual responsibility from the perspective of the collaborator instead of the victim. Malle shows that historical events of this magnitude do not intrude on people's lives as moral choices. Therefore, it is foolish to hold people morally accountable for their actions. Lucien's collaboration springs from the peculiarities...
...TIME, April 14) were deleted before its American release. Currently, a new work by Marcel Ophuls is being re-edited and thoroughly reworked. The Memory of Justice, a meticulous and moving examination of the Nuremberg war trials, was made with the same stringent conscience and intellect that characterized The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls' monumental study of France during the Resistance. The Memory of Justice is an equally important film. Now it is being hacked by its producers into a routine documentary...
...personal, painstaking, and does not wag an accusing finger. Producer Puttnam's comment that the film was too "personal" is, as Ophuls wrote him, "worse than use less." It also led the director to question whether the people who had hired him had ever seen The Sorrow and the Pity or A Sense of Loss (about Northern Ire land), films that were neither detached nor dispassionate, and which employed the same scrupulous techniques...
...only brings me sorrow...