REVISITING THE SORROW AND THE

PITY: AN INTERVIEW WITH MAR-

CEL OPHULS

Andrew Sobanet

The following is a transcript of portions of an interview conducted on

May 26, 2005 with the director Marcel Ophuls. True to the form of
his lengthy documentary films, Mr. Ophuls was quite voluble, and the
interview lasted just over three-and-a-half hours. The length of the
conversation necessitated much editing as well as some chronologi-
cal re-ordering. The interview also meandered between English and
French; for simplicity and readability, I have elected to translate the
French portions into English. The selections below focus primarily
on The Sorrow and the Pity, the Vichy era, and depictions of the war
in post-war cinema.1

AS: Every time I watch The Sorrow and the Pity, which is over four
hours long, I think about the fact that you filmed fifty-five hours of
footage.

MO: More than that.

AS: I’m wondering what happened to the rest of the film.

MO: Why?

AS: Because I’d like to see it.

MO: No, sir. That is a professor’s question. They’re journalistic

notes. In order to ascertain the authenticity or the proof of an article
or an essay, you don’t go asking for the journalist’s notes. They
310 ANDREW SOBANET

should be put somewhere in a bunker and nobody should have ac-

cess to them without my permission. Because in my kind of docu-
mentary filmmaking, the word “manipulation” (I’ve written about
this) is nothing else but choice in the editing. But yes, it is highly
manipulative in the sense that I sometimes cut people off in mid-
sentence to bring in somebody else and then I come back to them
later in a completely different part of the transcript. I don’t respect
chronology in the interviews and still, I’ve tried to get, I’ve tried
to portray the people on the screen in the way they feel themselves
that they should be portrayed. The people who feel I have not been
fair to them, they write articles in Le Monde, so they have exercised
their right to respond.

AS: How did you choose the castle at Sigmaringen for the inter-
view with Christian de la Mazière? I thought it was an appropriate
setting, given the fact that it was the site of Pétain and Laval’s post-
D-Day exile, and in a certain sense, highlighted the bankruptcy of
their brands of right-wing extremism, not to mention the demise of
the Vichy regime.

MO: We did the interview with Christian de la Mazière at Sigmarin-

gen because he initially did not want to talk. André Harris [a co-pro-
ducer of the film] insisted, I believe rightfully so, that we absolutely
must include an extreme collaborator: in other words, either from
the Charlemagne division or from the milice, someone who truly
represented a truly pro-collaboration position. Harris thought that it
was necessary for the film, and I was totally in agreement with him,
only among my personal acquaintances, I didn’t know anyone like
that! They therefore found a press liaison in the French film industry
who worked, above all, for Jewish producers at the time. His name
was Christian de la Mazière. They would go to lunch with him, while
I was shooting, and they would treat him to these wonderful feasts.
After all that, Christian said at one point, “Yes, yes, yes, OK. If I
come out of the closet, you are going to make me lose my clientele
of producers on the Champs-Elysées. But, it is indeed true that I
am upset about the whole thing, and I feel like getting all of it off of
my chest.” And then two days later, he called to say, “No, it’s going
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AN INTERVIEW WITH MARCEL OPHULS

to be impossible, I spoke to some friends – some who were in the

Charlemagne division and others who were collaborators – and they
all said not to [speak on camera], as it would ruin my career” and
so on and so forth. Which was not true, by the way. Quite simply
what happened was, that day of filming – Christian’s testimony – was
supposed to be done either in Paris or Clermont-Ferrand. When
Christian finally agreed to do the interview – on the condition that
it would not be me who did the interviewing, because he was scared
of the militant Jew who would ask him too many questions – he had
to accept to come to Germany, since we were there at the time (and
at the end of the shooting for the film) and we could not move the
entire team to go back to France. So, on the phone, Harris and I,
we asked ourselves where we would put him, and we just came up
with the idea of Sigmaringen. I can’t remember if the idea came
from André or me. Sigmaringen is among the symbols that became
representative of the film’s dramatic qualities. I am not at all in
disagreement with you. But the idea that we researched locations
is contrary to and is far removed from my technique that consists
above all of opening enough doors and to have enough choices to
let reality come to us.

AS: But the questions push the witnesses in certain pre-determined

directions. For example, when you ask Mr. Verdier, the pharmacist
who appears as père de famille (along with his children) in his living
room, to define what it is to be bourgeois.

MO: No, it’s André who asks him, “Do you define yourself as bour-
geois?” And Verdier responds, by saying “Well, if you have a hunting
ground in Sologne, and so on and so forth, if that’s the definition of
bourgeois, then I’m a bourgeois.” I’m quoting from memory. It’s
Harris who was much more leftist than I. I am not very politicized.
But it was Harris who was the champion of Mitterrandisme when
the socialists and Mitterrand represented the opposition party. But
just as we sought out an extreme collaborator, we also searched
for members of the Resistance who were not official members
of the Resistance, medaled members of the Resistance. The two
Auvergnats farmers are not the same thing as Emmanuel d’Astier
312 ANDREW SOBANET

de la Vigerie or the founders of the “Combat” resistance network.

They were authentic and courageous resistance fighters but totally
unknown, because they were not part of what we called the réseaux.
That is, they worked – Grave says it himself with great pride – that
he worked directly for the English, not for De Gaulle.

AS: He says they were at war and that he was registered in London.
But he does not say that he doesn’t work for De Gaulle.

MO: But they worked in alliance with De Gaulle. No, he was not
under De Gaulle’s orders. He worked under the orders of an outfit
called the SOE, the Secret Organization in Europe. But to come
back to Verdier, what I wanted to say is that none of this is central
casting. No planning, no scripts, nothing of that kind. Because I
never do it, because I think it is contrary to the ethics of documentary
filmmaking. You should never prepare, you should never repeat a
take, you should never tell a non-professional well, this was very
good but we’d like you to say it in slightly another way. If you do
that, you’re no longer in documentary filmmaking. It’s absolutely
forbidden. If what the person has said is not so hot, then you look
for something that is better. You should never seek out a security
blanket, neither before, nor after, nor during because, in the end, it’s
the good Lord (I’m atheist), it’s random chance that will come to
your aid. Now, that does not prevent us from resorting frequently
to certain clever tricks. At one moment, we were desperate because
we could not place an ad in La Montagne to say that we sought out
a head of a family who did nothing during the Occupation! That
would have been a little cheeky. So, what happened was, that Har-
ris, who was a very handsome man who had a lot of success with
women, had a relationship with a very young woman. She must have
been between 16 and 18 years old, and she was still going to high
school. And I told him, “André, listen, if you still are seeing this
young woman, why not use her as an informer in the high school?
So she could ask her friends to find us someone who did nothing
during the Occupation.” And so here comes Verdier, who had a
good sense of humor about it, because he was very, very aware of
having done nothing during the war. It’s his daughter – who was
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AN INTERVIEW WITH MARCEL OPHULS

friends with the high school girl – who told us, “My Dad didn’t do
a damned thing!” In contrast, it was raining resistance fighters, like
in Singing in the Rain. It’s never hard to find real or fake members
of the Resistance. It’s the easiest thing in the world.

AS: But I got the impression that Verdier thinks that he did some-
thing significant.

MO: Oh no. On the contrary. When he tells his story about the
moped, when he realized all of a sudden that he was riding along
with a German column, and then he turned back around. And when
he talks about the two young Jewish girls, and says he hadn’t tried to
hide them. He followed the orders of the pharmacy inspector. He
says, quite simply, “What did you want me to do, sir, I went into the
cellar to weep.” But that’s true for a lot of the French. A big majority
of the French are tolerant people and, contrary to their reputation,
are not necessarily xenophobes. We will see in a few days with the
referendum on the constitution, where in my opinion, the “No” vote
is at risk of winning, because, notably, of xenophobia.2 And, also
notably, because of Iraq and Mr. Bush, and also unemployment and
globalization. The French want to curl up and protect themselves.
This idea that it is necessary to protect oneself is a constant in the
history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in France. To
defend oneself, to protect oneself, to shelter oneself, whether it be
behind the Maginot line or in a pharmacy. And there is no shame
in that. It’s Anthony Eden in The Sorrow and the Pity who is my
personal spokesman. And he is not only the spokesman for the Eng-
lish, but for all those, myself included, who did not live through the
Occupation. You don’t know in advance, in general, whether you
are going to show that you have balls in a moment when your life
is in danger. I ask you, what are armies? Armies have been formed
since the beginning of time for one sole purpose: so that there may
be – by means of officers, generals, and governments – people who
push good citizens in the rear end to go fight in the trenches. People
normally do not do so because they are heroes. They do it in general
because they are wearing a uniform and are obeying orders. After a
country is conquered, and the question of obeying orders is no longer
314 ANDREW SOBANET

relevant – because, in that regard, Pétain was not powerful enough

to give orders to a defeated nation; he couldn’t, the Germans could
give orders, but, yes, Pétain and Laval, yes, they gave orders, too,
and ignoble and loathsome orders at that, but – after the defeat, the
French were left to fend for themselves. If one had a family, one
spent the bulk of one’s time looking for some sausage on the black
market. There is no shame in that. One must not bring everything
back to the rafle du vel d’hiv. By the way, the rafle du vel d’hiv,
except for the people who had to stay there, unfortunately, has a
place of greater importance in the way in which the French in their
majority, repressed as long as they could (all the way through the
death of Mitterrand) the idea that Pétain’s French state was the
legitimate government of the French republic at that time, and that
there were a great many French citizens who either denounced, or
collaborated, or did cowardly things. Who says it would have been
different in another country, given the ideas of the Third Reich, and
the way in which they occupied a country. And maybe the Polish
resistance was more heroic. But what we think we know is that it
was also fantastically anti-Semitic. Maybe the poor Jews who had
been able to escape from the ghetto, they were gunned down not by
Nazis, but by Poles who fought in the resistance; because the Polish
have a very distinct vision of their destiny as an oppressed people,
as Catholics.

AS: Lacombe Lucien is often mentioned in the same sentence as

The Sorrow and the Pity.

MO: But that’s just bullshit. Because I’m not the one who started
off la mode rétro and because I am not a relativist. I was the same
age as the girl in Lacombe Lucien and we were hidden in Aix-en-
Provence and it was crawling with German officers, Italians, and
Gestapo agents at the Hôtel du Roi René. It would have never oc-
curred to me – but I was a boy, mind you, not a girl – to go dancing
in that type of place. The perspective we have on history, especially
on those years in particular, is a function of the circumstances in
which we live at the present time. A retrospective viewpoint is
necessarily myopic.
 REVISITING THE SORROW AND THE PITY: 315
AN INTERVIEW WITH MARCEL OPHULS

AS: At the time of your interview with him, did Helmuth Tausend,
the former German officer, who also appears as a père de famille at
his daughter’s wedding, know you were Jewish?

MO: That’s a good question. Frankly, I don’t remember. Yes, in

general, I always mention that fact before interviews, and particu-
larly with Nazis, or crypto-Nazis, where you can suspect Nazism.
Not out of some kind of moral scrupulousness. But simply for
pragmatic reasons: because a long time ago I noticed that it is a
good strategy to lay one’s cards on the table. To say what you’re
doing, who you are. And then get the hell out, for whatever pretext
– to go make a phone call, or go drink a coffee at the bistro down
the street because you haven’t had breakfast, or to go take refuge in
the camera car because you supposedly have some sort of technical
thing to take care of – just until the moment when the lighting is done
and you can start the interview. Laying one’s cards out is a totally
different thing from censoring yourself to avoid asking questions
that could make people uncomfortable. What I noticed with Nazis
– or crypto-Nazis, people of the extreme right, and so on – is that
if I tell them what the nature of the interview or film is, they are
much more prepared to lay it all out themselves, not because they
are asking you for forgiveness, but because they would, in the end,
like to celebrate some kind of reconciliation. It’s very odd. A man
like Tausend categorically does not change his mind.

AS: How were you able to get access to the wedding ceremony and
reception of Tausend’s daughter?

MO: It’s a very simple story. The German defense minister had
provided us with a list of officers, deputy officers, and soldiers who
had served in Clermont-Ferrand. And at that time, the shooting of
the film had already been finished. There must have been twelve
German officers on the list of those who had served in Clermont-
Ferrand. That doesn’t mean that there were 12 officers in all of
Clermont-Ferrand. It just means that, since there were no pension
rights for a defeated army, not many people in 1945-46 had par-
ticular interest in leaving their names and their biographies at the
316 ANDREW SOBANET

Ministry of Defense. But there were 12 of them, which was already

sort of an indication of their political beliefs, because, as I say, the
others had just vanished because there were no pension rights, so it
wasn’t terribly interesting for them. So I phoned them. I wanted
a non-commissioned officer or a private and I found Tausend in
Bavaria. Note also that we had very little money and the people
were either dead, or stuttered on the phone, or they had a hair lip,
or various things that disqualified them. And mostly it had to do
with the proximity to Hamburg where I was working, where I was
editing the film: Fallingbostel is about sixty miles from Hamburg
and I could go with the camera car in the morning and be back at
night. Tausend asked me to come down, so that we could talk about
it. We had coffee in a German café and I met this man, who said
he’s not in favor of giving interviews to those lefty intellectuals who
work on German television. So, I thought “Well, this is probably
a good man for us to have, otherwise he wouldn’t have said that.”
And so I reassured him, which I usually do in such cases, which
consists in saying, “Well, look, it will still be your words, even if
I cut it in a “leftist intellectual” way. It will still be your phrasing,
your thoughts, and your words.”

AS: Absolutely.

MO: Not quite as absolutely as you think. You can do anything

with documentary. I could tell you horror stories about what can
be done with it. But it is the sort of thing that a man like Tausend,
who has a great deal of self-esteem, would swallow whole. So then
I open my agenda and he opened his agenda, so we could find a date.
And the first thing he says is, “Oh well, on next Tuesday I can’t do
it because I am marrying my daughter.” And I said “Oh? Can’t we
come to that?” And he said, “There will be a lot of guests and it’s
not that big of a room and you won’t find place for the camera.” I
said, “Don’t worry about us, we always find place for the camera.”
And that’s all there is to it.

AS: How was it that you were able to interview Paul Schmidt,
Hitler’s chief interpreter. Why was he not in prison?
 REVISITING THE SORROW AND THE PITY: 317
AN INTERVIEW WITH MARCEL OPHULS

MO: First of all, what has to be said is that he was the official top-
notch interpreter before Hitler came to power. I imagine he must
have also undergone some kind of de-Nazification process. And he
points that out at the end. He says that its been my whole career
under several governments. Certainly he didn’t deserve to be sitting
beside Goering. Because he was just a translator. He could have
been de-Nazified in such a way that he would have been forbidden
to exercise his profession for a few years, which is what they did
with people like Leni Riefenstahl, who made anti-Semitic films.
But that’s a little different from Paul Schmidt. As you can see from
the villa, he is in a luxurious spot. Well, he had a whole transla-
tion bureau working for him after the war and he also had language
schools in Munich. This nothing compared to the fact that the head
of the Gestapo in Toulouse [Karl-Heinz Muller] became the head
of police in Chelle, the one who closes the door in my face in Hôtel
Terminus.

AS: How did you come across Denis Rake?

MO: It was through Colonel Buckmaster, who was his boss during
the war for the SOE and who was the head of intelligence in occupied
Europe, whom I had interviewed. He said if you’re interested in the
Clermont-Ferrand region and in the maquis d’Auvergne, you really
should go see my friend Denis Rake. You’ll probably be surprised
when you see him! And the business about his [Rake’s] being a
homosexual and wanting to prove to others that he could be just as
brave as others, that was entirely his. Those are not thoughts that I
breathe into people because I hate to do that. I think people who do
that should be drummed out of the profession and tarred and feath-
ered. I just don’t do that. It seemed to me fairly obvious when we
met that he was a homosexual. He was deliberately effeminate. Not
all homosexuals are deliberately effeminate, but he was. The point
is that I did not bring up that subject, he brought up the subject.

AS: He was a transvestite singer. That was what he did for work.

MO: Right. But all of that I didn’t know when I went to see him.
318 ANDREW SOBANET

That’s the only pure joy that this stupid branch of movie making
– because it is a stupid branch – brings.

AS: Why is it a stupid branch?

MO: Because big-time movies are better.

AS: How did you decide to use Maurice Chevalier to sort of book-
end The Sorrow and the Pity? You open the film with a clip of him
singing in front of troops and you end the film with a clip which
shows him speaking directly to a camera explaining his wartime
activities. From what I’ve been able to find about his activities, he
is telling the truth about what he did during the war.

MO: He is. He’s not held up as a collaborator. He’s held up as a

man who sang throughout the Occupation and did his job. There’s
nothing wrong with that. And yes, his presence in the film is simply
because I saw the document that would fit in at the beginning (the
singing). And another American document from CBS that I found
from the end of the war, where he says, “For a man who looks so
good, I’ve been shot a great many times.” And then he says that
when he goes back to Hollywood, he will sing for the Americans,
which reminds him then in turn of a song called “Sweeping the
clouds away.”

AS: What about Madame Solange? How did you find her and why
did you pick her?

MO: Oh, she was notorious in Clermont-Ferrand. Everybody

told us about her, but everybody believed that she was guilty, not
of collaboration, but of denunciation, which is, of course, in many
ways, worse. If you are asking me whether or not she is guilty, I
must repeat, I am not a judge. I am not a prosecutor, and in many
occasions I do not even want to know. I just want to hear people’s
stories and then compare the stories they tell with what we think we
know about history.
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AN INTERVIEW WITH MARCEL OPHULS

AS: You said earlier that you try to portray people the way they
see themselves.

MO: She sees herself as innocent. My own feeling is that when

she talks about the bathtub torture that she was submitted to by
these people whom she doesn’t quite want to describe but who are
obviously communists or FFI people in the first days or the first few
weeks after the Liberation who tried to make themselves interest-
ing. Like in the Brassens song: shaving women’s heads and so on.
That seems without doubt. Whether the tribunal that followed was
correct in assuming that it was her handwriting in the denunciation
is something else. I am not qualified to judge on that. But I have a
sort of a tendency to feel that it was an affaire de cul. This comes
out if you listen to it carefully, because she hates the other woman.
She hates the wife.

AS: The other woman did indeed forge her handwriting, though,
to frame her.

MO: That’s what Solange says.

AS: Didn’t it come out in the court proceedings?

MO: But I wasn’t in the court!

AS: Point well taken. So you didn’t actually do research on the

case apart from what she said in the interview.

MO: No, I don’t do that! I don’t have the time. I don’t have the
money. And it’s not my job. Post-filming research is for professors,
excuse me. Professors either have tenure or they have a steady sal-
ary. I have to go scrounge around for my next job, usually for very
little money. OK, here’s another story.

AS: OK.

MO: The Graves brothers. When the film came out and created
such a scandal and such a triumph, the French press corps made a
320 ANDREW SOBANET

bee line for Clermont-Ferrand. Some of them to try to show that I

was a big, fat liar, some just out of human interest, I suppose. I never
went back. I only went there once, when they put the whole thing
on French TV in 1981. Then I went down for a so-called seminar
or colloquium. The sort of thing where you have an audience and
where you have various political people, who argue back and forth
about the merits or demerits of the film. So I couldn’t say no to
that. I was rather well received by the people in Clermont. The
people in Clermont rather liked the film, as far as I know. But the
Graves brothers were, of course, the first ones at the time whom the
journalists looked for. And I imagine they looked up court records
to find out whether Mme. Solange did or did not. Frankly, I don’t
give a damn. Because I’m a storyteller. I’m neither a journalist, nor
a historian, nor a professor of any kind. So these journalists went
to see the Grave brothers. And they ask Louis, who of course is the
main Grave brother. They ask Louis, that wonderful man, if he had
seen the film. And his answer was, “Are you bullshitting me? Do
you think I have the time or the patience to go and look at a four-
an-a-half-hour film?” And I think that’s fine.

AS: And what about his brother?

MO: I imagine that neither of them went to see the film. It was
Louis who gave that answer, because it was usually Louis who
answered.

AS: They seem to know Roger Tounze, the journalist, who also
appears in the film.

MO: We got them through Tounze who worked at the local paper
and who served as a sort of guide. And there again, naturally, all
sorts of evil things come up sometimes. Some guy, recently, in a
French paper thought that Tounze was a collaborationist – I don’t
know how he got that idea – and that there was meaning behind
the long shadow on the public square where I asked him about the
various names they have for “les boches.” It happened to be the end
of the day and the end of our shooting, and therefore his shadow
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AN INTERVIEW WITH MARCEL OPHULS

is very long! This is not a trick of the mise-en-scène to make him

look bad, it is just a good image. And then putting Bleibinger in
front of a Bavarian church – in the costume that he wears every
day – was just a follow-up on that. Because I had done that and I
remembered having done that, and I thought it would be funny to
have some German soldier, who had been called “les doryphores,
les frizées, les frizous,” and so on, to ask him what he remembered
about Clermont-Ferrand. And I ask him if he speaks French, and
he says “Oh just a few words,” and I said “What few words?” And
he says the few words, and it’s funny. And when I find something
funny, I usually, since these films are usually very somber, I try to
put funny things in. I’m not Claude Lanzmann. I don’t take myself
for the prophet of deported Jews. I’m just a filmmaker. Getting a
laugh on that is just fine, and it happens to fit into the situation, so
it’s all a matter of cutting.

AS: You do get Bleibinger in the same shot as a crucifix a little later
on. You do use the spaces in which you interview people to suggest
certain ideas to your audience.

MO: But the crucifix is in that restaurant.

AS: Yes, but you do accentuate it a little bit.

MO: I don’t think so.

AS: You make an effort to get it in the shot.

MO: Well, I think he was sitting in a niche of the restaurant and

the crucifix was there. I’m not denying that I do things like that
sometimes. Not in that particular film. You talk about the crucifix,
I had the occasion to interview General Warlimont twice, the first
time for the Munich film. And there I think I did use the crucifix as
a cut-away. I don’t think I used it in The Sorrow and the Pity. You
know I don’t spend my life looking at my films. When I think of
Bleibinger with his culottes bavaroises. We didn’t dress him up,
you know. In Upper Bavaria, that’s how factory workers, artisans,
322 ANDREW SOBANET

people who live modestly and who are traditionalist, and who are
Catholic, that’s how they dress.

AS: Did you know that that quote from Tounze ends up in Le Dernier
Métro verbatim?

MO: Which one, “les doryphores…”?

AS: Yes.

MO: François Truffaut was my best friend. I was certainly not

his best friend because he had hundreds of friends. He was my
best friend, he was my protector, and I am still mourning his death,
because he was really an extraordinary, and fantastically generous,
person.

AS: Who are your favorite directors today? Is there anyone you
like?

MO: “Is there anyone you like” is the better question. I still like
American films. I don’t like what used to be called the “Hollywood
brats.” I’m not particularly fond either of Coppola, nor of Scorsese,
nor De Palma. I think that Clint Eastwood is terrifically overrated
with the help of the Cannes festival and the corruption of the Cannes
festival.

AS: Why corrupt?

MO: I won’t go into it. No comment.

AS: Why not?

MO: I don’t care to finish my long life with lawsuits. They’re cor-
rupt not necessarily in a financial way. But corrupt in the way of
trying to accommodate the masses and glamour and People magazine
and artistry and pretending to discover new talents and all of that.
That seems to me to be a sham. But this is not the bitter, old, retired
man who is talking, although I am all of that. I prefer talking about
 REVISITING THE SORROW AND THE PITY: 323
AN INTERVIEW WITH MARCEL OPHULS

the ones I don’t like because it’s easier and more recent. You asked
me about Lacombe Lucien a little bit earlier and I didn’t answer you.
When Lacombe Lucien came out, Louis Malle went saying in every
interview that he couldn’t have made the film without The Sorrow
and the Pity. At the time I was in the States, and my public reac-
tion – I can’t remember in which paper – was well, if Louis made
Lacombe Lucien because of The Sorrow and the Pity, then maybe it
would have been better if I hadn’t made The Sorrow and the Pity.

AS: [Stunned silence] So, you really didn’t like Lacombe Luc-
ien.

MO: There was a long pause before you answered. No, I detest
Lacombe Lucien. Because it’s a film that kisses ass to French
consensus opinion in the sense that, “Oh well, it’s all a matter of
circumstance. If you’re a young fairly uncultured kid, you can join
the Gestapo just as easily as you can the Resistance.” That’s what
the film says. And it’s disgusting! It’s la mode rétro. And la mode
rétro is disgusting. All the way down to the Benigni film, which is
a disaster and a shame.3 Because in a real German concentration
camp, no father in the world would have gotten away with shielding
his son by pretending to tell him fairy stories. That’s total bullshit.
They both would have been shot on the very first day.

AS: Did you like Schindler’s List?

MO: Better. I think the ending of Schindler’s List is, again, a mat-
ter of Hollywood thrill: when the women’s convoy is by mistake
– by mistake! as if the SS made mistakes – is by mistake delivered
at Auschwitz and they go into the gas chamber and get a shower.
That is malicious, indecent, pornographic bullshit. But aside from
that ending and the rather grandiloquent thing when he goes onto
his knees and begs the Jews pardon for not having rescued more of
them. It’s commercial cinema. On that I must say that my friend
Claude Lanzmann is right, commercial cinema, sooner or later, when
it touches on those topics must try to rally the whole audience. And
if you want to rally the whole audience, you have to get the Germans
324 ANDREW SOBANET

on your side, and the Jews on your side, and the Americans on your
side, and the French on your side, because otherwise you won’t make
your money back, and that is prostitution, my dear friend.

AS: What do you think of Night and Fog? It’s only shown in
universities now. Nobody seems to talk about it or write about it.
It’s gone.

MO: It depends on the country. Night and Fog is a short film which
has the immense merit of having been the first, in documentary form.
Through the narration, it has a great poetic quality, but it manages to
be a little out of focus as far as the difference between extermination
camps and concentration camps and the difference between Jewish
inmates and non-Jewish inmates. But Alain Resnais is a great film-
maker and he has great merit and it took great courage at the time,
which was about three or four years before my film came out.4 He
is a great filmmaker anyway, and, well, the story that should be told
about that if you don’t know it already: Resnais and his producer,
who was a Jew, by the way, by the name of Anatole Dauman, couldn’t
get the film past censorship. The French would not only not send
it to Cannes, they didn’t want to exhibit it at all. The government
of the time, which was pre-Gaullist, wanted to forbid its release. It
was before De Gaulle returned to power. But the shot in question
was the shot where you saw the French gendarme standing in front
of the barbed wire of a camp called Pithiviers. And they had to
finally cut out that shot of their film. This is just to show you what
the situation in France actually was at that time. In order to be able
to show that film, they had cut out the one shot, the one accidental
glimpse that they had of a French policeman.

AS: That’s very troubling.

MO: Isn’t it? Especially if you realize that those tendencies – not
those people, the people in De Gaulle’s generation are dead – those
tendencies are still around and they’re getting stronger.

AS: That is what I think is so amazing about the end of Night and
 REVISITING THE SORROW AND THE PITY: 325
AN INTERVIEW WITH MARCEL OPHULS

Fog, when the narration compares those tendencies to a virus that

can come back at any time.

MO: Well, Mendès-France says it well at the beginning of The

Sorrow and the Pity. When I ask him “Does that not make you feel
bitter, Mr. Prime Minister?” and he says, “No, no, but that taught
me that one must always be careful in our country when it comes to
the resurrection of Anglophobia and French xenophobia.”

AS: Did you try to interview De Gaulle?

MO: No. The reason for that is that he would have made sure that
the film wouldn’t come out. Naturally. Surely you must be aware
that the film destroys the Gaullist communist myths. Not because I
was militant about it, but simply because if you make documentary
films, which is a shitty way of making films anyway, you might as
well at least tell the truth. Tell the truth as you see it and not as some
government officials, or even “Great Men” like our long-departed
General, may God bless his soul. It’s not my job nor should it be
anybody’s job to let himself go in for Bush propaganda, De Gaulle
propaganda, any propaganda. The only propaganda that I can sym-
pathize with is Frank Capra’s propaganda, and John Huston’s and
George Stevens’s, who were asked by the American army during
World War II to tell the G.I.s what the fighting was supposed to be
about.

AS: Do you admire what De Gaulle did during the war?

MO: You mean getting on the very first plane from Bordeaux to
represent France all by himself in London?

AS: Yes.

MO: First of all, I think it was the right thing to do for officers
of the French army: not to accept the French armistice, even in
defeat, on the terms that Pétain wanted to make them. So I am for
that gesture. But, at the time, he had just been freshly made brigade
326 ANDREW SOBANET

general. That’s a one-star general, just above colonel, and nobody

knew him. Does one admire people for choosing the right side?
Well, it depends. If you ask me about his actions with respect to
his relationship with Churchill and Roosevelt, I think that most of
the time he was very arrogant and very chauvinistic.

AS: Before we conclude, I’d like to return to The Sorrow and

the Pity for a bit. Of all the things that are said in the film, why
did you take the one quote from Raphaël Géminiani (“Non,
non, les Allemands on ne les a pas vus.”) and highlight it on the
screen?

MO: Because it seemed to me so fantastically funny and odd,

that a cyclist, who is training to be a champion, should have his
nose and his eyes so close to the handlebars that he couldn’t
see a German uniform.

AS: He also contradicts himself because at one point he says

the Germans were there, and at another he says they didn’t see
them.

MO: Yes, that’s right he does contradict himself. But no, the
idea that France was never fully occupied which is really what
he’s saying – it doesn’t strike me as one of the key interviews
in the film – but at the time when I made the film he was still
a very well known French bicycle champion and again I had
no way of knowing that he would say “Ah, non les Allemands
on les a pas vus.” Incidentally that is a bit ambiguous. Maybe
he’s just saying that he didn’t want to see them. I don’t think
so, but there you have indeed the classic case of immediately
contradicting that statement through editing, when we cut back
to Verdier and he says, “Ah je les ai trop vus; même dans mes
rêves.”
 REVISITING THE SORROW AND THE PITY: 327
AN INTERVIEW WITH MARCEL OPHULS

NOTES
1
For more information on Ophuls’s landmark documentary film, The
Sorrow and the Pity, see my article “From Wedding Chapels to German Castles:
Politicized Interview Sites in Le Chagrin et la pitié” in Contemporary French
Civilization (Winter/Spring 2005). Mr. Ophuls kindly agreed to an interview
after reading that article.

2
Mr. Ophuls is referring to the referendum on the European Union
constitution that took place in late May 2005. French voters did indeed reject
the constitution, 54.87% to 45.13%.

3
Life is Beautiful (1997) directed by and starring Roberto Benigni. 4
Resnais’s film was released in 1955.
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