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

Documentary and Allegory: History Moralized in Le Chagrin et la pitiéAuthor(s): Carol Plyley JamesSource: The French Review, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Oct., 1985), pp. 84-89Published by: American Association of Teachers of FrenchStable URL: http://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.

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HISTORY IN LE CHAGRIN ET LA PITIE

to re-release Le Chagrin et la pitie precisely for its documentary value-as one of the many documents available for examination.

The sense in which I am labeling Le Chagrin et la pitie an "allegorical film" has more to do with the film's critical functioning than with its contents per se. One might expect an allegorical film to be fantasy or costume drama (or even a postmodern fiction like Godard's Sauve qui peut/La Vie) that obliquely represents some moral/political/ethical problem which, for one reason or another, cannot be directly portrayed. An allegory seeks, by means of a self-contained narrative, to show not merely the immediately accessible, but also to suggest some abstract, unrepresentable concept that informs and finally overrides its literality. Among familiar variations on allegorical interpretation are the four- fold interpretation of the events of the Old Testament, the "figura" of Dante (as elucidated by Erich Auerbach3), the humanist tradition in the visual arts where the ideals of the arts and sciences or moral and aesthetic qualities are suggested by picturing associated artifacts or conventionalized acts, and, more in our own time, Marxist interpretations of literature as indirect representations of History. A documentary film would seem an unlikely candidate as a vehicle of allegory for several reasons. First, there is no fabulation or fictional narrative but a presentation of "facts" no matter how chaotic they may be. Second, the "message" of documentary arises deductively from its content: the process is empir- ical. Third, a documentary seeks not to mystify or glorify but to be coterminous with the real, that is, to be understood as having a sign rather than a symbol relationship to the real. In addition, since the time of Goethe and the Romantic degradation of allegory as too distant from personal experience, allegory as a high literary genre has virtually disappeared. The term "allegory" in film criticism today-or to be precise, in film reviewing-is coded to signal the endless recourse to stereotypical characters and static ideas. Even the educated movie-going public equates allegory with morality lessons and situations con- cocted to "symbolize" something other than their literal (i.e., real) sense. A documentary film, like any representation, contains elements of contrivance and symbolism, and it is always in the gap between what is perceived as real and its interpretation that we seek to understand the one and the other side. Since allegory always plays off some element of truth, its connection to 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 story- telling or as a hermeneutic device so much as a particular kind of critical awareness-a rhetorical strategy. A great deal of recent criticism has centered on a renewal of interest in allegory. As a traditional tool of exegesis and recovery of the significance of the past, allegory fits into the interest in history that has followed the largely synchronic preoccupations of structural linguistics and anthropology and their offshoots in literary criticism. Allegory's refusal of a

3 Auerbach stressed the importance of historical truth in the interpretation of Biblical events given the four-fold interpretation and demonstrated how Dante guaranteed the validity of his allegory by connecting it to people of the real world. 'Figura, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (NeW York: Meridian, 1959), 11-76.

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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 readability (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 interpretation: 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.

86 FRENCH REVIEW




Auvergne, physically close to Vichy, are used as border areas in more than the political sense. Although the respective dates and places, for example, "Champs- Elysees, 1942," or "Sigmarigen, 1969," label the sequences, the total effect is one of a chronological reconstruction of the war period. The factual side with 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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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, however, 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.

88 FRENCH REVIEW




and death dates, and official honors appears. This cinematic obituary em- blematizes what Ophuls was trying to do with this film, finding and fixing a more accurate but humanistic image of France during the Occupation. This image also cleverly sets up the changes in the film's subtext that will occur subsequently: when we see the film today, Anthony Eden, Pierre Mendes- France, and others now gone are similarly memorialized. A sadness of loss- the loss of these true heroes, the years of lost French ideals-penetrates the film and confirms Benjamin's view that allegory is a product of melancholy.9

A documentary, unlike a more conventional allegory, has a special relation to the Real. Ophuls uses the old films to let us conjure up images of the past, and he uses the interviews to form our judgment. The meaning we draw from the film comes from the rifts between images of the past and their (re)interpretations. If in France people now hesitate to refer to World Warr II as "la Resistance," it is perhaps because of this film. But then, too, it was 1969 when Ophuls was working on it, a time for reexamining the important moments of French history. The revelation, or more precisely, the pertinent reminder, of the widespread collaboration during the Occupation may also be an allegory for the quick return to "normality" after the May-June events of 1968, a warning not to mythologize history again. In the final analysis, then, a more general message comes through, a statement about France's tendency to downplay certain moments of its history, moments that reveal a passivity inconsistent with revolutionary ideals.

Moralized history is as old as the Middle Ages, but filmmakers more interested in history than fantasy are rare today. Even Ophuls now has his doubts about the role of film. Interviewed in June 1983 on Studs Terkel's radio program, Ophuls stated that documentary is too much a lie-the invading camera destroys too much-and that fictionalized forms of history are much more honest. He suggested a desire to do the lives of famous people such as Arthur Koestler (obviously not all necessarily admirable figures) using paid actors and scenario writers. Even if less "honest," the attraction of documentary still holds him, and a more recently announced project is a film on the Barbie trial, should it ever take place.?1 It would be a film about how the present recuperates the past, in some ways a continuation of the probes of Le Chagrin et la pitie but with the immediacy of an on-going event. One senses that the fears of 1969 about the effect of that film on the public are the same fears of facing one's ugly past that today are postponing the Barbie trial beyond the time limit within which any clear reconstruction of the factual events would be possible. When Barbie and the other principals are finally dead, the real story, the mythmaking, will begin in earnest. If there is no film because the trial never took place, we can look for the reasons in Le Chagrin et la pitie: as an allegory it projects a moral whose validity continues in effect. ROOSEVELT UNIVERSITY

9"The only pleasure the melancholic permits himself, and it a powerful one, is allegory." The Origin of Germanl Tragic Drama, p. 185.

10 Discussed at several symposia and lectures and in another Studs Terkel interview on WFMT- FM during a residency at Columbia College, Chicago, in March 1984.

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Documents

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