Le Chagrin et la Pitié
I watched 4 executions on Wednesday. The men were blindfolded, tied to a row of stakes, and shot all at once by a firing squad. As they were hit, their bodies jerked and crumpled, sliding down the stake with their hands tied behind them, like curtains pushed along a pole. Puffs of smoke from the rifles drifted away. In the background were trees.
They were collaborators. It was 1945, in black and white footage shot by the perpetrators of the execution. The scene was shown in the documentary Le Chagrin et la Pitié by Marcel Ophuls – a film considered so scandalous at the time it was made in 1971 that ORTF, who’d commissioned it, refused to screen it.
The reason for the outrage was nothing to do with the executions, or the description of the barbaric torture practised by the Gestapo on Mme Mury to extract a confession, but the way the film challenged precious myths about the German occupation of France. Instead of a nation united in resistance, we are shown a motley collection of individuals with their accommodations, self-justifications, denials, impaired memories, sufferings and occasions of heroism.
Not that I’m going to digress far from this blog’s monomania. Besides, there are plenty of reviews of the film online, and I’m not going to disagree with the general view that it’s brilliant, compelling and complex. There’s a meme that the documentary steps back from judgement, allowing people to speak in their own words; but this is a naive underestimation of what any director does in choosing his interviewees, and choosing where to shoot them, where in the narrative to place their footage, and what to leave on the cutting room floor. (What, for example, occasions the coincidence that the words “Je suis catholique” are only ever spoken as a defence of Pétainism, and only by some of the most odious people in the film?)
I was struck by Lord Avon (Anthony Eden), who came across as a thoughtful and compassionate man (and who incidentally spoke good French). He was not prepared to condemn the actions of those French who had worked with the Vichy régime, for who was to say what the British would have done if they’d found themselves in that position? It was a less common attitude then than now. Not that he was arguing for any sort of moral relativism, more for an understanding of the extraordinary exigencies and difficulties the French had to undergo.
It’s always chastening to be reminded of the need to know the whole picture before we judge. There are moral absolutes we cherish. When some evil threatens what we hold dear, we might sacrifice these, or what we perceive to be a fraction of them, as if they were divisible. Threatened by terror, we are prepared, we think, to sacrifice a bit of liberty, a bit of free speech, a bit of freedom from torture, a bit of equality before the law, a bit of freedom from discrimination, a bit of right to fair trial, a bit of freedom from arbitrary arrest, a bit of freedom from arbitrary interference with privacy, home, family or correspondence, a bit of freedom of free association, a bit of freedom of movement...
This is happening all round what we like to call the free world. It’s happening in defence of values we hold dear. Which are...
Oh, but aren’t we just signing those away? This was France's dilemma. The judgement of the French after the war was that collaboration was wrong, that in some cases it even deserved punishment by death.
So that's how I came to be watching executions, in a documentary widely considered to be a classic. There’s more than one irony there, somewhere.
They were collaborators. It was 1945, in black and white footage shot by the perpetrators of the execution. The scene was shown in the documentary Le Chagrin et la Pitié by Marcel Ophuls – a film considered so scandalous at the time it was made in 1971 that ORTF, who’d commissioned it, refused to screen it.
The reason for the outrage was nothing to do with the executions, or the description of the barbaric torture practised by the Gestapo on Mme Mury to extract a confession, but the way the film challenged precious myths about the German occupation of France. Instead of a nation united in resistance, we are shown a motley collection of individuals with their accommodations, self-justifications, denials, impaired memories, sufferings and occasions of heroism.
Not that I’m going to digress far from this blog’s monomania. Besides, there are plenty of reviews of the film online, and I’m not going to disagree with the general view that it’s brilliant, compelling and complex. There’s a meme that the documentary steps back from judgement, allowing people to speak in their own words; but this is a naive underestimation of what any director does in choosing his interviewees, and choosing where to shoot them, where in the narrative to place their footage, and what to leave on the cutting room floor. (What, for example, occasions the coincidence that the words “Je suis catholique” are only ever spoken as a defence of Pétainism, and only by some of the most odious people in the film?)
I was struck by Lord Avon (Anthony Eden), who came across as a thoughtful and compassionate man (and who incidentally spoke good French). He was not prepared to condemn the actions of those French who had worked with the Vichy régime, for who was to say what the British would have done if they’d found themselves in that position? It was a less common attitude then than now. Not that he was arguing for any sort of moral relativism, more for an understanding of the extraordinary exigencies and difficulties the French had to undergo.
It’s always chastening to be reminded of the need to know the whole picture before we judge. There are moral absolutes we cherish. When some evil threatens what we hold dear, we might sacrifice these, or what we perceive to be a fraction of them, as if they were divisible. Threatened by terror, we are prepared, we think, to sacrifice a bit of liberty, a bit of free speech, a bit of freedom from torture, a bit of equality before the law, a bit of freedom from discrimination, a bit of right to fair trial, a bit of freedom from arbitrary arrest, a bit of freedom from arbitrary interference with privacy, home, family or correspondence, a bit of freedom of free association, a bit of freedom of movement...
This is happening all round what we like to call the free world. It’s happening in defence of values we hold dear. Which are...
Oh, but aren’t we just signing those away? This was France's dilemma. The judgement of the French after the war was that collaboration was wrong, that in some cases it even deserved punishment by death.
So that's how I came to be watching executions, in a documentary widely considered to be a classic. There’s more than one irony there, somewhere.
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