Marcel Ophuls

The director of The Sorrow and the Pity, who confronted unpleasant wartime truths in his Nazi documentaries

- Patrick Kidd

In early 1969, not long after the strikes and civil unrest that had rocked Paris, Charles de Gaulle felt his countrymen were not ready to hear about the moral ambiguity of life under Nazi occupation. “France doesn’t need unpleasant truths,’ the president said when told about a TV documentary. “France needs hope.” The programme was axed.

Marcel Ophuls, who had been commissioned by French state TV to make the two-part film about collaboration, acknowledged the president's sentiment. “It’s rather beautiful,” he said. “But his job and mine were not the same, were they?”

The son of a German-Jewish filmmaker, whose family had fled to France with the rise of Hitler and then again to America after their adopted land fell, Ophuls did not intend to condemn those who failed to resist the Nazis. But The Sorrow and the Pity revealed something uncomfortable behind De Gaulle’s national myth. War had been messy.

Ophuls spent two years on his film, much of it interviewing people in Clermont-Ferrand, a city in the Auvergne. Some admitted they collaborated out of antisemitism, others simply for a quiet life. One son of an aristocrat asked what else someone of his class could have done. “I couldn’t be a communist, obviously,” he said. “Besides, we were all a little thrilled by Hitler’s show. It was like Cecil B DeMille.”