Pauline Kael on collaborating with evil
Why did so many French do what they did after the Nazis invaded?
The long-time and very influential movie critic, especially in the years (1968 to 1991), she reviewed movies for The New Yorker , Pauline Kael often examined the movies as expressions of the culture. This is taken from her review of the documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, published in The New Yorker in 1972 and reprinted in The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael.
The movie, directed by Max Ophuls, tells the story of the German occupation of France through interviews with Germans, French collaborationists, French victims, and Frenchmen who didn’t do anything (the “inactives”), mostly from Clermont-Ferrand, a city near Vichy. It is a movie “about the effects of character upon political action,” Kael writes.
The Hollywood war movies were propaganda for our side, and put us in the comfortable position of identifying with the heroic anti-Nazis. The Sorrow and the Pity makes us ask what we and our friends and families would actually have done if our country had been invaded, like France. . . .
There’s grace in Ophuls’ method; he helps us to see that the issues go way beyond conventional ideas of assessing guilt — that the mysteries of human behavior in the film are true mysteries. . . .
The heroes of the Resistance are the most unlikely people — stubborn, rebellious “misfits”: a genial, though formidable, farmer, a bohemian aristocrat who at one time smoked opium, a diffident homosexual who became a British agent in France in order, he says, to prove that he was as brave as other men. They’re not like the fake heroes in Hollywood’s anti-Nazi movies, and they’re impossible for us to project onto: we would be diminishing them if we tried.
People who suffered tell stories of iniquities that we can scarcely bear to hear; others remember nothing, selectively. One man saw no Nazis and doesn’t believe Clermont-Ferrand was occupied. . . .
We see that those who were inactive were not necessarily indifferent to the suffering of others: A sane, prosperous pharmacist sits, surrounded by by his handsome children, and, without attempting to deny knowledge of what was going on, tells his reasons for remaining apolitical. They’re not bad reasons — and who could call a man a coward for not having the crazy, aberrant nobility it takes to risk his life (and maybe his family)?
(It’s especially difficult for a woman to pass judgment, since women are traditionally exempted from accusations of cowardice. For most women, the risk of being separated from their children is a sufficient deterrent from any dangerous political acts, and who considers them immoral for that, even though they constitute a huge body of the docile and fearful?)
It’s only when you think of a country full of decent, reasonable people with such good reasons that you experience revulsion. . . .
It was in France during the Occupation that Simone Weil wrote, “Nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed. The tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul; to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it — can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune’s image.”
She was writing about the Iliad, but she was writing about it because the Nazis, like the Greek and Trojan warriors, were modifying the human spirit by the use of force.
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