General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Sorrow and the Pity

The Sorrow and the Pity (Le Chagrin et la Pitié) is a two-part, roughly four-hour black-and-white documentary directed by Marcel Ophüls, released in 1969, that examines life in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand under Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1944 and documents the extent of French collaboration with the German occupiers¹^•². Built from extended interviews with residents, resistance fighters, collaborators, and German veterans, interwoven with French, English, and German newsreels, it challenged the postwar national account, promoted by Charles de Gaulle, that France had resisted the occupation as one people and that collaboration had been the work of a few³^•². French state television refused to broadcast it for twelve years, and its eventual screening became a landmark in France's reckoning with the Vichy years⁴.

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Le Chagrin et la Pitié, subtitled "Chronicle of a French town under Occupation"⁵
Director and producers	Marcel Ophüls; produced by André Harris and Alain de Sédouy for Télévision Rencontre¹
Length and format	Two parts, about 4 hours 10 minutes to 4 hours 23 minutes depending on the version; black and white⁶^•⁷
Co-production	Norddeutscher Rundfunk (West Germany), Télévision Suisse Romande and Société Suisse de Radiodiffusion (Switzerland), and Télévision Rencontre (Lausanne)⁸
French cinema release	14 April 1971, visa dated 20 March 1971, listed at 263 minutes⁶
First French TV broadcast	October 1981 on FR3, twelve years after completion⁵
Recognition	Nominated for the 1972 Academy Award for Best Documentary²

Spoilers

Subject and method

Ophüls chose Clermont-Ferrand, a city in central France about an hour from Vichy, the seat of the collaborationist French state, and itself a center of resistance activity, as a microcosm of occupied France⁹. The film covers the German invasion of 1940, the formation of the Vichy regime under Marshal Philippe Pétain, daily life under the occupation, the rise of the Resistance, and the Liberation of 1944 and its aftermath¹⁰.

The method combined archive material with contemporary interviews conducted by Ophüls and André Harris¹¹. Interviewees included residents of Clermont-Ferrand who remembered the occupation, French, German, and British government officials, writers, farmers, artists, and German veterans⁷. Among the prominent figures were the former prime minister Pierre Mendès France, a Jewish resistance fighter; the British politician Anthony Eden; the former Communist leader Jacques Duclos; and Christian de La Mazière, a French aristocrat who served in the Waffen-SS and spoke frankly about his motives⁵^•¹². A reviewer in The New Yorker in 1972 described the result as "both oral history and essay," in which witnesses' accounts are corroborated, corrected, or sometimes flatly contradicted by the evidence shown alongside them¹³.

The film presents much of its archival footage without commentary, a choice Ophüls later discussed as carrying a risk of misreading; he explained, for example, that a shot of French policemen apparently giving the Nazi salute at Hitler's entry into Paris could be confused with the oath gesture to Pétain, and that the clip had been selected from Goebbels's propaganda crews mainly for its technical quality¹⁴.

Refusal by French television

The film was originally commissioned for French television, whose producers Harris and de Sédouy had developed a documentary style at the ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française) combining archive materials with contemporary interviews⁴. When it was completed, the ORTF's management declined to buy or broadcast it, arguing it could still damage the dignity of certain families; Ophüls called this "censure par l'inertie," censorship by inertia, and noted that the office never formally banned the film because it never even viewed it¹¹^•¹⁵. The head of French state television, Jean-Jacques de Bresson, told a Senate commission that the film "destroys the myths the French still need"⁵. Simone Veil, a magistrate on the ORTF board and a former deportee, made her opposition to the film a personal cause, saying it "spat on France"⁸.

Abroad the film circulated freely. It was broadcast in West Germany from September 1969, then in Switzerland and on the BBC, and by 1981 twenty-seven foreign television networks had shown it⁸^•⁴.

Cinema release and broadcast in 1981

Facing television's refusal, Ophüls persuaded Harris and de Sédouy to release the film in cinemas, with the help of his friend François Truffaut; the theatrical visa was obtained by Vincent Malle and Claude Nedjar⁸. It opened in Paris on 14 April 1971 in a single arthouse cinema, the Studio Saint-Séverin in the Latin Quarter, the only cinema in France initially willing to screen it; word of mouth and critical acclaim drew long queues, and the film spread to other Parisian and provincial cinemas⁶^•¹¹^•⁹. By 1981 only about 600,000 moviegoers had seen it in French cinemas⁴.

The broadcast finally came after the Socialist victory of May 1981. One of the new television management's first decisions was to acquire the film for prime-time national programming, and it was shown on the third channel, FR3, on 29 October 1981, over two evenings¹⁶^•⁵. The channel's program director, Serge Moati, said the French people were mature enough to decide for themselves⁴. By then the French press welcomed the showing; Le Monde wrote on its front page that parents and grandparents would have to give a detailed account of their actions or lack of them during the occupation¹⁶.

Impact on French memory and historiography

The film's central claim, that many more Frenchmen collaborated with the Nazis than was officially admitted, struck directly at the Gaullist myth of a united, resistant France¹⁷. The historian Henry Rousso credited it as the first film to confront directly the memory of Vichy and the occupation, and described it as the moment "the mirror was broken" for a nation whose historical memory had been self-flattering¹⁸.

Its perspective was soon reinforced in scholarship. Robert Paxton's Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-44, published in 1972 and translated into French the following year, supported the film's account of the regime's collaboration¹⁵. Later, John Sweets's study Choices in Vichy France: The French under Nazi Occupation (1986), examining the same town of Clermont-Ferrand, took issue with the image of the local population the film conveys¹⁵.

The film is now grouped with Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1956) and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) as one of three French documentaries that changed France's understanding of the war and the Holocaust¹⁹. Its cultural reach extended to popular cinema through a recurring homage in Woody Allen's Annie Hall⁷.

Reception and later standing

The film was nominated for the 1972 Academy Award for Best Documentary². Reviewing it in The Atlantic in 1972, David Denby called it "one of the greatest documentaries ever made"¹². Ophüls himself was ambivalent about the work: he described it as little loved by its director, and he attempted suicide during its production⁵. He died in 2025 at 97, by which time the film was generally regarded as the cornerstone of his career²^•²⁰.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026