An ode to a monumental film — and a lesson for 2025
Great art is called 'timeless,' but that's not quite right. A masterpiece is always timely. The world turns, generations pass, and the work of art somehow keeps pace. Its message today might not be what it says half a century, or half a millennium, from now.
When Marcel Ophuls released his documentary 'Le Chagrin et la Pitié' in France decades ago (it reached the U.S. as 'The Sorrow and the Pity'), French authorities denounced the monumental film. They saw it as a radical attack on mainstream French culture and postwar nationhood. By revealing the extensive collaboration by conservative French society with the Nazi occupation in World War II, Ophuls was seen as taking the side of leftists whose anti-government protests had reached a peak in the Paris streets in 1968.
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