In 1972, Marcel Ophüls challenged the conventional wisdom of France regarding its role in World War II. The Sorrow and the Pity documents the occupation of France during the second World War, the Vichy government’s collaboration with the Germans, and the human tragedy that resulted from that collaboration. What made the film more than just a pictorial record of archival evidence, however, was Ophüls’s use of incisive contemporary interviews, intercut with the wartime news footage, in which French, German, and English subjects recollect the times and their attitudes toward them, then and now. Responses that ranged from regret to rationalization to outright denial contribute to a powerful examination of how historical events are absorbed into the public psyche.