He's not sorry

Talking with Marcel Ophuls

It's almost 30 years since Marcel Ophuls, a director of minor French comedies like Banana Peel, switched to documentary and produced the monumental work about the French Resistance, The Sorrow and the Pity (1971). This four-and-a-half-hour saga, which the MFA will be showing over the coming three weekends (September 23-24, September 30-October 1, and October 7-8), was infamous in its day for suggesting that not every French citizen who survived the war was a freedom fighter. Some, including movie star Maurice Chevalier, forged comfortable lives by cooperating with the puppet Vichy government. Others were Nazi collaborators.

At the time of an earlier The Sorrow and the Pity revival, Maureen Turin and I, both University of Wisconsin graduate students, queried Ophuls about his work. Mesmerized as we were by the far-left filmmaking ideology of Jean-Luc Godard, we interviewers asked only the most militant, abrasive questions, never acknowledging the film's great strengths. Were we rude! Perhaps Ophuls should have walked away; instead, he stood up to our belligerent inquisition. Here are some of the highlights.

Q: Why are women in such a subordinate position in The Sorrow and the Pity?

A: This question is asked at every bull session. There must be some justification for it. Women resistance leaders in France are treated today as Joan of Arc figures at official ceremonies. They transport the flowers and the flag to the sounds of trumpet calls. Maybe it is because of this sexist representation that I intuitively stayed clear of their particular fate. . . . Maybe I'm just rationalizing.

Q: But what about Madame Grave, who is there during your long conversation at the home of the Grave brothers, who were in the Resistance? Mostly she comes in and pours wine for the men.

A: I spent several days there and I know that Madame Grave is a very important figure in the household. During the time of the Resistance she was also a very important figure. Yet the whole evening of the filming she stayed between the kitchen and the living room. We didn't set it up that way. It just happened.

One of the producers, a political journalist, André Harris, became very uncomfortable because he believes in sexual equality, that every part of the family should contribute to the conversation. So he said, "Madame, why don't you join us? Come sit at the table, participate . . . "

Here's what a documentary maker should not do. The men started shifting their feet. She didn't want to sit down because her daughter-in-law would be left out. Now all of us were uncomfortable. Finally, out of courtesy, Madame sat. We shot two or three reels, and I found in the editing room that I couldn't use a single sentence.

Harris, who should have known better, had blown it. My basic belief about documentary-film direction is that you must not upset the scene you are filming, and especially not by projecting your own ideas.

Q: You seem obsessed with balancing one side to another, with being generous to everybody, the Truffaut school versus the Godard. Why shouldn't the documentary maker take sides?

A: There's an awful amount of misunderstanding in your question. I take sides, I always accept the challenge. You ask whether I'm on the Godard side or the Truffaut side. I'm on the Truffaut side, and there you are right. I do believe in individualism. I do believe in pluralism. If you want to call that "shitty liberalism," no matter. My politics are in complete accordance with those views. You are free to put me in league with TV journalists who get one man representing one side and one the other and thus hide behind both of them. I don't believe I'm in that camp. My films have points of view that annoy a great many people, so much so that I am accused of manipulation.

I do get the facts from all sides. I use confrontation of different points of view, and that may be a very bourgeois way of expression, but this form of film is the only kind that interests me in the nonfiction field. To me, agit-prop is not creative. I can't do anything with it. It bores me.

Q: How would you react if someone like Godard were to label The Sorrow and the Pity a "Hollywood film"?

A: I don't know what Godard thinks of the film. I don't know if he dislikes it as much as I dislike his films. If someone called The Sorrow and the Pity a Hollywood film, would I feel insulted? No, I think there's a great deal of truth to that statement. This movie is a Fifth Column documentary made by someone telling a story with a beginning, middle, and an end by use of sex, music, cutting, and manipulation, in a field where most of these things are considered by puritans as wrong to do. It's the puritan who passes on the fiction that if you use real people and take a camera into the street, you are closer to the truth than if you used Spencer Tracy. I don't believe that.

I'm getting unhappy with the word "documentary," and I don't go out and see other documentary films. This is one of the embarrassments that comes out in these discussions. When I go to a movie, I usually see a movie.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

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