Documentary and Allegory: History Moralized in Le Chagrin et la pitié

Author(s): Carol Plyley James

Source: The French Review , Oct., 1985, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Oct., 1985), pp. 84-89
Published by: American Association of Teachers of French

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/394204

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THE FRENCH REVIEW, Vol. LIX, No. 1, October 1985 Printed in U.S.A.

Documentary and Allegory: History

Moralized in Le Chagrin et la pitie*

by Carol Plyley James

MARCEL OPHULS'S FOUR-HOUR DOCUMENTARY Le Chagrin et la pitie1 is not really

a cinema piece at all because it was filmed for television in 1969. It became
known to us in movie houses, however, because the Pompidou government,
and subsequently that of Giscard-d'Estaing, sensing the damage such a film
could do to the national self-image, refused to have it run on public television.
The inflammatory nature of the film-its having become such a cause celebre
that one of Mitterrand's campaign promises (which he kept) was to finally let
it be seen by the televiewing, i.e., general, public-comes from its political
content, of course, but more specifically from the filmmaker's intent to use the
film to expose certain mythologies about the Resistance. His success is attested
to by the singular effect the film has had on the French nation's idea of its own
history; it has been, pedagogically speaking, a mission accomplie.
Considering all the historical documentation that has come to light in the
past fifteen years and the continuing discussion concerning the Vichy regime
and the Resistance--Le debat qui n'en finit pas," as Express put it in introducing
four more new books on the period2-Ophuls's approach may seem a bit naive
today, but I think not. Simply rereading the text confirms that it is a classic in
the sense that it can be reread in a way that widens rathers than diminishes its
portee. Ophuls's documentary anticipated rather than followed the exposure
provided by new documents. In view of the current affaire Barbie and the
continuing examination of the collaboration, now would be an appropriate time

* A version of this article was presented as a paper at the AATF annual convention in Lille (June
1983).
Le Chagrin et la pitie: chronique d'une ville francaise sous l'Occupation, directed by Marcel Ophuls.
A production of Television Rencontre (Lausanne) and co-produced by Norddeutscher Rundfunk
(Hamburg) and Societe Suisse de Redaction (Lausanne), 1969-1971. Producers: Andre Harris and
Alain de Sedouy. Scenario and interviews by Marcel Ophuls and Andre Harris. Black and white,
256 minutes. Quotes and information here taken from L'Avant-Scene/Cinema, Double Number 127/
128 (1972).
2 L'Express, 20 mai 1983, pp. 26-28. The works referred to are J.-B. Duroselle, L'Abime 1939-1945
(Imprimerie Nationale), Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz (Fayard), Rene de Chambrun, Pierre Laval
devant l'Histoire (France-Empire), and Michel Slitinsky, L'Affaire Papon (Alain Moreau). Also
mentioned is the recent work of Robert O. Paxton and Michael R. Marrus, Vichy et les juifs
(Calmann-Levy, 1981). In his book Ren& de Chambrun continues to defend his brother-in-law as
he did during his interview with Ophuls.
84

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HISTORY IN LE CHAGRIN ET LA PITIE 85

to re-release Le Chagrin et la pitie precisely for its documentary va

of the many documents available for examination.
The sense in which I am labeling Le Chagrin et la pitie an "allegori
has more to do with the film's critical functioning than with its contents
One might expect an allegorical film to be fantasy or costume drama
a postmodern fiction like Godard's Sauve qui peut/La Vie) that oblique
sents some moral/political/ethical problem which, for one reason or
cannot be directly portrayed. An allegory seeks, by means of a self-c
narrative, to show not merely the immediately accessible, but also t
some abstract, unrepresentable concept that informs and finally over
literality. Among familiar variations on allegorical interpretation are
fold interpretation of the events of the Old Testament, the "figura" of Da
elucidated by Erich Auerbach3), the humanist tradition in the visual a
the ideals of the arts and sciences or moral and aesthetic qualities are
by picturing associated artifacts or conventionalized acts, and, more in
time, Marxist interpretations of literature as indirect representations of H
A documentary film would seem an unlikely candidate as a vehicle of
for several reasons. First, there is no fabulation or fictional narrative
presentation of "facts" no matter how chaotic they may be. Second, t
sage" of documentary arises deductively from its content: the process
ical. Third, a documentary seeks not to mystify or glorify but to be coter
with the real, that is, to be understood as having a sign rather than a
relationship to the real. In addition, since the time of Goethe and the
degradation of allegory as too distant from personal experience, alle
high literary genre has virtually disappeared. The term "allegory
criticism today-or to be precise, in film reviewing-is coded to s
endless recourse to stereotypical characters and static ideas. Even the
movie-going public equates allegory with morality lessons and situat
cocted to "symbolize" something other than their literal (i.e., real) s
documentary film, like any representation, contains elements of con
and symbolism, and it is always in the gap between what is perceive
and its interpretation that we seek to understand the one and the ot
Since allegory always plays off some element of truth, its conn
documentary is perhaps not as tendentious as might first appear.
What I want to explore here is not so much allegory as a genre of
telling or as a hermeneutic device so much as a particular kind o
awareness-a rhetorical strategy. A great deal of recent criticism has
on a renewal of interest in allegory. As a traditional tool of exegesis and re
of the significance of the past, allegory fits into the interest in history t
followed the largely synchronic preoccupations of structural linguis
anthropology and their offshoots in literary criticism. Allegory's ref
3 Auerbach stressed the importance of historical truth in the interpretation of Bibl
given the four-fold interpretation and demonstrated how Dante guaranteed the valid
allegory by connecting it to people of the real world. 'Figura, in Scenes from the Drama o
Literature (NeW York: Meridian, 1959), 11-76.

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86 FRENCH REVIEW

generic split between literature and theory is certainly attractive to a deconstruc-

tionist approach to criticism which tends to erase the borders between history,
literature, and philosophy. The new limelight in which allegory basks derives
broadly from the revalorization of the allegorical mode that came out of the
work of Walter Benjamin, particularly in The Origin of German Tragic Drama.4
Postmodern art, primarily in the pages of the quarterly October, is being defined
in terms of allegorical impulse.5 Among the several recent book-length reex-
aminations of allegory-and the reissue of Angus Fletcher's important Allegory:
The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Cornell University Press, 1964)-the most
influential work has been Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading (Yale University
Press, 1979).
For de Man, allegory lies in a text's self-proclaimed and self-defined reada-
bility (this is not unlike Frye's definition of allegory as occuring "when a poet
... tries to indicate how a commentary on him should proceed"6). Now, in the
deconstructive mode where referentiality is thrown into doubt, readability
becomes an aberrant critical judgment. The functioning of allegory becomes
more complicated if it aims to persuade but has no certain truth or "proper
meaning" behind its figures. Allegories are, then, really constituted by their
ethical force, as de Man states it, "the term ethical designating the structural
interference of distinct value systems" (p. 206), by the needs of rhetoric rather
than by the static forms of value systems. De Man makes the further point that,
"Needs reenter the literary discourse as the aberrant proper meaning of meta-
phors against which the allegory constitutes itself" (p. 310).
An allegorical text, then, is not merely self-reflective nor is it pointing to itself
as an aesthetic object, but plays out in its own form the ethical conflict between
proper and figural meaning. Very quickly stated, the difference between this
notion of allegory and the old allegory is not one of substance but of interpre-
tation: the romantic/modernist view of allegory is that it represents an (always
failed) attempt to adequate sign and meaning; in this perspective, a nostalgic
allegory is set against an essentialist symbol. The poststructuralist perspective
views allegory as a replay of the gap or differance (to use Derrida's term) which
enables writing to be. Whatever motivates a representation-a need to rework,
re-present-is not viewed negatively but as a creative force, the origin of a
dissemination. Ophuls's work falls into this newer conception of allegory
because he does not insist that a particular truth of circumstances be established
with his evidence but that a moral truth-an acceptance of questioning and the
possibility of wrongdoing-be established.
Ophuls put together Le Chagrin et la pitie in two registers, interspersing film
clips from the 1938 to 1945 period among interviews, conducted in 1969, of
various people who were in Clermont-Ferrand during the war. Clermont and
4 The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977).
5 See Joel Fineman, 'The Structure of Allegorial Desire," October, 12 (1980), 47-66, and Craig
Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,' Part I, October, 12 (1980),
67-86 and Part II, 13 (1980), 59-80.
6 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 89-90.

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HISTORY IN LE CHAGRIN ET LA PITIE 87

Auvergne, physically close to Vichy, are used as border areas in more

political sense. Although the respective dates and places, for example,
Elysees, 1942," or "Sigmarigen, 1969," label the sequences, the total
one of a chronological reconstruction of the war period. The factual s
its extensive documentation contrasts with but also reinforces the film's didactic
motivation to show how what one thought about the period was incorrect, that
history has to be redone. Since the old film fragments and the testimony of
various political figures and Resistance heroes cannot have been completely
unfamiliar to the French public, the deconstruction of ideology takes place more
in the film's format itself, in its weight and choice of evidence. The way the
director juxtaposes segments, his camera angles and settings of the interviews,
and especially, the supplementary scenes-those that are superfluous to the
reconstitution of exactly "what happened" during the war-permit a fictionali-
zation that redirects the spectator toward a different interpretation of history.
Cinema exploits the generic duplicity and interpretive force of allegory best
through its own kinds of figurality.
Using a series of episodes strung together by arbitrary cutting, the documen-
tarist composes his message by combining elements of a mise-en-scene over
which he does not have the same control as a feature film maker. He cannot
know just exactly what the interviewees will say, and "real" settings, the
newsreel clips in Ophuls's case, are so many pieces detachees from other contexts.
The allegorical message comes out of the editing process that pieces together
the fragments into a new context of their own. Angus Fletcher puts forth a
model of allegory functioning on overdetermination. A painter of allegorical
canvasses may crowd the picture with symbols, and a writer, unconstrained by
conventions of spatial economy, adds episode to episode: allegory lacks an
"inherent 'organic' limit of magnitude."7 Ophuls, for his part, piles up fragments
of the past for an almost intolerable length of time and leaves the spectator to
seam the pieces into a whole. The footage from old feature films and newsreels
carries the role of history as an impersonal record, impassively registered by a
camera's all-seeing eye. These scenes are confronted with the reminiscences of
eye-witnesses from all sides of the question. Unlike Warren Beatty, who in Reds
idealized his witnesses by placing them, portrait-like, against a dark backdrop,
Ophuls puts his in a definite setting which, while not removing them from their
everyday contexts, often deliberately contrasts with what they recount. The
Grave brothers, heroes of the Resistance, talk about torture and betrayal while
enjoying a glass of wine with old friends in the family kitchen. Christian de la
Maziere, an ultra-rightist who fought in Hitler's Charlemagne division of the
SS, strolls nonchalantly through the elegant German chateau where Petain was
housed to prolong the Vichy regime after the Liberation; Madame Solange sits
in her cramped beauty shop while nervously telling about being mistakenly
denounced after the war. In each case, drawing upon the conventions of
common knowledge, the settings establish the interviewee's social class and

7 Allegory, pp. 174-78.

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88 FRENCH REVIEW

lead the spectators to infer a relation between social class and war-time behavior.
One-sided conclusions would prove, however, to be false because in most cases
a social class is shown to have provided partisans for both sides. Ophuls turns
the drawbacks of documentary-talking heads, the distortions of memory, the
unease of the interviewees, the lack of dramatic anticipation-to his advantage.
The interviewers' voices generally remain "off," but not infrequently a head or
hand or more intrudes, drawing the spectator into the questioner's role.
Just as a painter of allegories meticulously arranges the objects or personages
that represent some abstract quality or branch of knowledge, Ophuls carefully
sets up a spatial identity for his characters, particularly those who are not well
known. Some deliberately awkward scenes are created, including the one with
Madame Solange where the close-up scarcely budges. The opening scenes,
notably, seem to be inviting us to squirm a little. A French resistance sympathizer
has gathered his children around him for the interview; uneasy on their straight
chairs, the young people interject a few hesitant questions. Playing counterpart
to the serious, even guilt-ridden French family is the family of a retired German
colonel who was part of the occupying forces in Clermont; he is interviewed
while the family celebrates a daughter's wedding. Between toasts and cigar
puffs the colonel reflects about his role in the Occupation and about the
occupied people. His self-assurance and lack of any regrets contrast with the
ambivalence of the Clermont pharmacist. It is the latter who sums up the
situation with the words, "le chagrin et la pitie," at which moment the opening
titles begin to roll. These two families and other "unknowns" become generic
representatives of certain subgroups-elite resistants, peasant partisans, people
who "saw nothing," Jews, business people beset by problems of dealing with
occupiers, prisoners of war, and so forth. Whereas these archetypes are carefully
arranged in a setting, special subjects like Pierre Laval's brother-in-law or
Hitler's interpreter or the historic figures like Mendes-France, Georges Bidault,
Anthony Eden, General Warlimont-people who must retain their individual-
ity-are portrayed in less ideologically marked situations. They are not, how-
ever, without a role in the allegory. As spectres from the past they enjoy an
aura of time and heroism that tends to be humanized by the banality of their
settings. Now, an allegory takes the form of a narrative, but it is not historical
narrative. Its ethical motivation, its desire to effect a generalized message, plus
its rhetorical status-de Man says "allegorical narrative [is] repetitive of a
potential confusion between figural and referential statement"8-all of this
neutralizes time. The allegorist valorizes not chronology but the ruins of time,
and the role of historical personages in Ophuls's documentary is less their
contribution of historical facts than their confirmation of human pettiness and
blindness but also survivability and dignity.
One of the resistants interviewed, Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie, died
before the editing of the film. After his last words in the film are heard ("Toute
la Resistance j'ai eu peur, . .. mais ... moi, je n'aurais pas songe a me suicider,
j'adore la vie"), his image is fixed on the screen and a listing of his name, birth

8 "Nietzsche's Theory of Rhetoric," Symposium 28 (1974), 44.

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HISTORY IN LE CHAGRIN ET LA PITIE 89

and death dates, and official honors appears. This cinematic obit
blematizes what Ophuls was trying to do with this film, finding and
more accurate but humanistic image of France during the Occupatio
image also cleverly sets up the changes in the film's subtext that w
subsequently: when we see the film today, Anthony Eden, Pierr
France, and others now gone are similarly memorialized. A sadness
the loss of these true heroes, the years of lost French ideals-penetr
film and confirms Benjamin's view that allegory is a product of melan
A documentary, unlike a more conventional allegory, has a special
to the Real. Ophuls uses the old films to let us conjure up images of
and he uses the interviews to form our judgment. The meaning we d
the film comes from the rifts between images of the past
(re)interpretations. If in France people now hesitate to refer to World
"la Resistance," it is perhaps because of this film. But then, too, it
when Ophuls was working on it, a time for reexamining the important m
of French history. The revelation, or more precisely, the pertinent remin
the widespread collaboration during the Occupation may also be an a
for the quick return to "normality" after the May-June events of 1968, a
not to mythologize history again. In the final analysis, then, a mor
message comes through, a statement about France's tendency to
certain moments of its history, moments that reveal a passivity inc
with revolutionary ideals.
Moralized history is as old as the Middle Ages, but filmmakers more int
in history than fantasy are rare today. Even Ophuls now has his doub
the role of film. Interviewed in June 1983 on Studs Terkel's radio p
Ophuls stated that documentary is too much a lie-the invading
destroys too much-and that fictionalized forms of history are much
honest. He suggested a desire to do the lives of famous people such
Koestler (obviously not all necessarily admirable figures) using paid ac
scenario writers. Even if less "honest," the attraction of documentary
him, and a more recently announced project is a film on the Barbie tr
it ever take place.?1 It would be a film about how the present recuper
past, in some ways a continuation of the probes of Le Chagrin et la
with the immediacy of an on-going event. One senses that the fears
about the effect of that film on the public are the same fears of fac
ugly past that today are postponing the Barbie trial beyond the time limit
which any clear reconstruction of the factual events would be possi
Barbie and the other principals are finally dead, the real story, the mythm
will begin in earnest. If there is no film because the trial never took
can look for the reasons in Le Chagrin et la pitie: as an allegory it p
moral whose validity continues in effect.
ROOSEVELT UNIVERSITY

9"The only pleasure the melancholic permits himself, and it a powerful one, is alle
Origin of Germanl Tragic Drama, p. 185.
10 Discussed at several symposia and lectures and in another Studs Terkel interview
FM during a residency at Columbia College, Chicago, in March 1984.

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