The Sorrow and the Pity - The Collapse (Part I)

A 1969 Documentary Film by Marcel Ophuls. Audio in French and German, with English subtitles.

Divided into two parts - The Collapse and The Choice - the film examines the responses of the French people to German occupation and their reasons for tending toward resistance or collaboration, focusing on the Auvergne region and the city of Clermont-Ferrand. Events are presented in roughly chronological order, with interviewees appearing throughout both parts of the film. Initially commissioned by France TV to create a two part made for TV documentary, the film was banned after Ophuls submitted it to the studio that hired him. The film was first shown on French television only in 1981.

Director Marcel Ophuls combined interviews and archival film footage to explore the reality of the French occupation in one small industrial city, Clermont-Ferrand. He spoke with Resistance fighters, collaborators, spies, farmers, government officials, writers, artists and veterans. The result is a a shattering portrait of how ordinary people actually conducted themselves under extraordinary circumstances. Featuring: Pierre Mendès-France, Sir Anthony Eden, Dr. Claude Levy, Denis Rake, Alexis and Louis Grave, Christian de la Mazière, Maurice Chevalier and many more.

The title comes from a comment by interviewee Marcel Verdier, a pharmacist in Montferrat, Isère, who says "the two emotions I experienced the most [during the Nazi occupation] were sorrow and pity".

Maurice Chevalier's "Sweepin' the Clouds Away" is used repeatedly during the film. Chevalier was a popular entertainer with the German occupation force and was accused of collaboration even while he claimed to have offered support to the resistance, mirroring the complexities of French reactions to occupation highlighted in the film.

Totally unavailable for 15 years, this new version features complete subtitles for the first time ever. The first DVD release of the film in France came in November 2011. The film has been both praised and condemned in France. The film has also been criticized for being too selective and that the director was "too close to the events portrayed to provide an objective study of the period."
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25088330
https://www.commentary.org/articles/stanley-hoffmann-2/on-the-sorrow-and-the-pity/

Part 1: Focuses on the period after the fall of France in 1940 and the activities of the collaborationist Petain regime. Includes an extended interview with Pierre Mendès-France, who was jailed by the Vichy government on charges of desertion, but escaped from jail to join Charles de Gaulle's Free French forces in England. He later served as Prime Minister of post-war France.