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At The Movies
`The Sorrow And The Pity'
Marcel Ophurs masterwork about the issues of collaboration and resistance
comes to the big screen in the original French-language version.
Buy
one dinner
entrée at
regular price,
get the
second for
Annie: All right, what do you want to do?
Alvy: I don't know now. You want to go to another
movie? Let's go see "The Sorrow and the Pity."
Annie: Oh, come on. You've seen it. IM not in the
mood to see a four-hour documentary on Nazis.
— From 'Annie Hall," a film by Woody Allen
Gaulle's "official version" of World War II, which proposed
that France had nobly resisted the occupation, revealing it
to be a willfully misleading nostalgia.
With the goal of re-educating France about its participa-
tion in the occupation, The Sorrow and the Pity was imme-
diately received as a major cinematic and journalistic
achievement. Nevertheless, when the American rights
lapsed and the owners of the film had gone bankrupt, this
important film went out of distribution in 1987 and has
remained virtually inaccessible until now.
This year, Woody Allen presents to the American public
Equal or lesser value.
Monday through Thursday
4 p.m. - 9 p.m. only.
Not ifalid with any other offer.
Must present ad when ordering dinner.
Southfield location only.
29244 Northwestern Highway
(248) 351-2925
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AUDREY BECKER
Special to the Jewish News
Mr
hen Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity
was released in America in 1971, it generated
widespread acclaim. The documen-
tary, subtitled "Chronicle of a
French City under the Occupation," pieces
together a fractured narrative of the Nazi occupation
of France during the Second World War.
Considered one of the most influential documentaries
ever made, director Ophuls — a German Jew by birth but
officially a French citizen — intended the film to counter-
act misinformed patriotism. The film explodes Charles de
Behind The Scenes
DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
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For the first time since 1987, and for
the first time ever in the original
French, The Sorrow and the Pity,
Marcel Ophuls' seminal documen-
tary about France under Nazi occu-
pation, has come to the United
States, where it will be screened next
weekend at the Detroit Film Theatre.
Since the 1971 release, there have
been hundreds of Holocaust-themed
feature films and documentaries, but
Ophuls' 4 1/2-hour epic about ordi-
a re-released version of the documentary. Gone is the
English over-dubbing that compromised the impact and
integrity of the first American release. In its place is the
original French language version with English subtitles.
Edited from more than 60 hours of interviews, the 4 1/2-
hour documentary explores a grand spectrum of com-
plicated and perplexing responses to the Nazi occu-
pation — apathy, complacency, hostility. And, per-
haps most disturbingly: complicity.
According to author/biologist Dr. Claude Levy, one of the
many subjects interviewed by Ophuls, "France is the only
country in all Europe whose government collaborated ....
Audrey Becker is a Detroit-based critic.
nary people making extraordinary
choices remains classic. And though
Schindler List has proven that such
films may find a vast commercial
audience, those who brought The
Sorrow and the Pity back to the
screen insist they did it for love.
The re-issue began a couple of years
ago, with the visit of another great, if
controversial, documentarian to Los
Angeles: Leni Riefenstahl. Hitler's old
filmmaker was receiving the lifetime
achievement award from Cinecon; one
member who irately left the organiza-
tion, in the well-publicized fray, was
Dennis Doros of Milestone Films.
The art-film distributor thought
about all the German filmmakers who
had chosen to leave Nazi Germany,
unlike Riefenstahl. He thought about
The Sorrow and the Pity, the film
about personal choice that had
changed his life when he first viewed
it in college. A re-issue seemed more
pertinent than ever, he theorized.
Easier said than done. Doros had
already tried, for a decade, to obtain
the rights, which had been tied up