The French Occupation and the Jews

SEVERAL YEARS AGO Marcel Ophuls's documentary film The Sorrow and the Pits reopened the painful subject of French behavior during the German occupation. The national collapse of 1940 represented to most Frenchmen a devastating indictment of their government and society. Consequently, in the process of national reconstruction after the war, nationalist politicians sought to project an image of a heroic France united behind de Gaulle and the Resistance Ophuls attempted to show that this image was a self-serving myth, since the Resistance never comprised more than a tiny fraction of the population, which for the most part collaborated actively or passively with the Vichy government and the Germans. Ophuls's interviews with survivors revealed a shocking absence of moral sensibility, even in retrospect. The most egregious instance was the case of a man incapable of understanding what was wrong with advertising in local newspapers that he was not Jewish. Ophuls clearly implied that the French must recognize the extent of the national failing represented by the occupation and urged a rigorous self-examination to discover its roots in French society and culture. National conduct during the Vichy regime could not longer be treated as a closed issue irrelevant to the present, for it threatened to condemn contemporary France for its silence.

Since the release of The Sorrow and the Pity, the moral and social issues raised by the occupation have become a focus of discussion in French political and cultural life, inspiring a series of films, most prominent of which is Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien Treating the problem of individual responsibility from the perspective of the collaborator instead of the victim. Malle shows that historical events of this magnitude do not intrude on people's lives as moral choices. Therefore, it is foolish to hold people morally accountable for their actions. Lucien's collaboration springs from the peculiarities of his personality and situation, particularities of his personality and situation, particularly his brutality familial resentments and rustic simplicity; given the opportunity, he would just as easily have joined the resistance. Two other recent films continue this dialogue on the occupation. Michel Mitrani's Black Thursday (Les Gutchets du Louvre) and Michel Drach's Les Violons du Bal. Focusing their attention on the deportation of French Jewry, these directors too explore the occupation in relation to individual experiences, providing a perspective complimentary to Malle's.

Black Thursday is July 16, 1942, the day most Parisian Jews were deported to the extermination camp at Auschwitz. Christian Rich plays Paul, an aristocratic young gentile student who hopes to use his advance warning of the deportation to save as many Jews as possible. On the morning of the deportation, he visits the Jewish quarters on the right bank to alert Jews to the enormity of their peril, to persuade them to hide and to offer them shelter on the left bank. Incredulity, confusion, fear and family solidarity conspire to prevent Jews from following Paul's advice: as French citizens, they cannot believe that the French police herding them into buses are sending them to their deaths. Of the Jews Paul approaches, only one girl. Jeanne (Christine Pascal), is finally convinced of the validity of his claims. Paul has nearly persuaded her to accompany him to the left bank and these to a romantic holiday on his parents' country estate, when Jeanne pauses at the gates of the Louvre, just as she is about to cross the bridge to safety. Recalling her mother and sister, Jeanne turns back, preferring death with her family to escape alone.

AS A DOCUMENTARY. Black Thursday provides a compelling depiction of the deportation. The medieval winding alleys of Jewish Paris. Its sleepy courtyards and stately squares teeming with frantic deportees, strikingly recreate the immediacy of the event. The spectacle of families with the remnants of their possessions being systematically loaded onto transport buses by teams of leather coated French police and the insistent pace of the action force the viewer to empathetic panic. From the blase anti-semitism of the police, the variations of concern, indifference and greed in the spectators, and the fatalism and disorientation of the Jews, a subtle portrait emerges of the historical actors and attitudes involved in the deportation.

As a treatment of ethical problems, however, Black Thursday is much less satisfactory. It is questionable whether the director could say anything meaningful about the occupation by treating the attempt of one well-intentioned individual to intervene. Does he want to argue that if all Frenchmen had behaved like Paul, then the deportation could never have taken place? Or does he want to show that Paul's failure to save anyone indicates the futility of his action? Both positions are implied in the film and both, perhaps, are partially valid, but to consider the issue in these terms is misleading. The sources of collaboration and resistance must be sought in a perspective which transcends the level of purely individual motivations.

While the film's intention is basically problematic, its execution hopelessly confuses the issue of individual responsibility for the deportation. The hero is, in fact, a thoroughly self-indulgent overprivileged youth, whose motivations fluctuate between a need to shore up his self-esteem by playing at heroism and a desire to seduce helpless Jewesses to whom he appears as a savior. Once Paul has induced Jeanne to accompany him, he promptly makes a pass at her. What more auspicious moment for commencing a beautiful relationship than immediately after Jeanne has seen her family loaded onto a deportation bus, her apartment looted by anti-semitic neighbors, and the streets thronged with police rounding up all Jews? Furthermore, the couple's growing intimacy is treated with tasteless, cliche sentimentality. Dramatic love scenes in dark hallways, passionate signs and sweeping camera movements substitute for emotional insight; the lovers' frantic attempt to escape the police and their eventual parting gradually overshadow the deportation, as the film degenerates into melodrama.

By considering the occupation largely from the viewpoint of an isolated individual. Black Thursday, like Lacombe Lucien, obscures the need to explain collaboration and resistance in wider terms, to determine not only why one individual made a specific moral choice, but rather why a whole nation allowed the deportation to occur. Consequently, both these films fail to cope with the fundamental issues involved in the occupation and so offer inadequate explanations of even individual motivations. In this sense, the Sorrow and the Pity, with its comparative scope and superior analytic technique, is a more penetrating investigation of collaboration than either of these films it has inspired.

LES VIOLONS DU BAL, on the other hand, while it presents the occupation as a personal experience, attempts to go beyond the purely accidental and individual in linking its concerns with the wider questions posed by Ophuls. Its with the wider questions posed by Ophuls. Its protagonist. Michel (Jean-Louis Trintignant), is shooting a film on his childhood experiences as a Jew during the occupation. The present in which the film is being shot is in black and white; the past it depicts, in lush, slow paced color sequences. All the actors in Michel's film are exquisitely beautiful, particularly his wife (Josse Nat) as his mother and his son (David Drach) as the young Michel. Its presentation is limited in perspective, focusing exclusively on what happens to one family, as seen through the eyes of a ten-year-old. Michel as director meticulously and lovingly reconstructs his childhood memories, suffusing them with retrospective pleasure despite their sinister content.

The lapse into romanticism and self-indulgence which threatens to mar the film's authenticity, however, is avoided by the stark contrast of the black and white sequences. The intercutting of past as color and present as black and white functions as a sort of Brechtian alienation effect, distancing the viewer from the action in order to make him consider its implications. The black and white sequences, both in form and content, pose the question of the occupation's meaning for Frenchmen today. The dull crowds of people, the dark buildings, the depressing film studio--mundane scenes from the present--undercut the exquisite nostalgia of the color sequences and reveal the director's consciousness of the limitations of his self-exploration.

In the same vein. Michel has painful difficulty marketing his film--his coarse and obese producer, between puts on a cheap cigar, urges him to spice it up with a few deaths, since no one is interested in live Jews these days. Returning from his interview at the studio. Michel rescues a young student who has been beaten by the police at a demonstration and helps him escape, largely because of his childhood experiences as a fugitive. Unable to understand his rescuer, the student mocks the study of film making as an occupation and needless Michel incessantly about his "bourgeois" life style as they drive to the frontier. Just before they reach the border. Michel stops the car next to a field and walks off, announcing that he is going to search for his past. At this point, the action cuts into the color film, which concludes with the escape of Michel and his family from the Germans to safety in Switzerland. When Michel returns to the car, the student is gone and the credits follow, without Michel's coming to any conclusion about the relationship of his childhood to his present life.

UNFORTUNATELY, Drach's view of the contemporary significance of the occupation remains obscure as well. The implied connection between a vulgar, greedy film producer, a policeman beating a demonstrating student and Michel experiences in the occupation is never clarified. The student is hardly a sympathetic figure--his rhetoric is simplistic and his behavior infurlatingly self-righteous--yet the director suggests that his resistance to the French police today is somehow analogous to his resistance to Vichy. Nevertheless, though his understanding of this connection is unsatisfying, Drach has found an effective formal means--the intercutting of color and black-and-white sequences--of handling the difficulties involved in recreating personal experiences of the occupation without lapsing into solipsism and emotional overkill. Les Violons du Bal asks the right questions; while it never fully answers them, it is nevertheless a more penetrating portrait of the occupation than Black Thursday, despite all the latter's historical detail.

By demolishing the accepted interpretation of the occupation. The Sorrow and the Pity challenged French filmmakers to come to terms with collaboration and to uncover its roots; by revealing that the Guallist state rested on the hollow foundations of historical myth which concealed continuity in the guise of change. Ophuls lent a particular urgency to his challenge. The progeny spawned by The Sorrow and the Pity have not yet begun to exhaust the avenues of investigation it opened. Bogging down in the confused psyches of its characters and the predictable suspense of its plot, Black Thursday obscures more than it illuminates. Les Violons du Bal, while far more interesting cinematically, does little more than delineate fruitful questions and tentative solutions.

There is, however, a danger that these groupings towards a fuller picture may be taken for sufficient exploration of an unpleasant subject. This is certainly the implication of the enthusiastic French reception of Lacombe, Lucien. It is no accident that Lacombe, Lucien is the official entry of the French government in all international film competitions this year. Whatever Malle's intentions, his concentration on the psychological peculiarities of the collaborator and the fortuitous nature of collaboration imply to those who wish to forget the occupation that it is a closed subject, without relevance to contemporary French society. Yet despite its ambiguities and the desire of official France to avoid painful subjects, the occupation experience has lost none of its relevance and Ophuls's arguments none of their force. It remains for responsible and critical French filmmakers to complete the task Ophuls has begun.