In memory studies carried out on the material of Germany, several basic strategies were noted for how society survived the war and dealt with the traumatic experiences; the post-war escape and forgetting were replaced by the glorification of the past. According to Aleida Assmann, the protests of 1968 showed that the heroic memorial project was not effective and the society was still ready for violence. The “ethical turn” in Germany was associated with the transition to a policy of repentance, with the idea of a “common catastrophe”, with a willingness to share responsibility for violence and solidarity based on compassion for a common sorrow. The aim of this article is to determine how relevant the patterns Assman sees analyzing the experience of Germany were for other countries. Can we say that the experience of trauma processing was universal? How do the social structure, cultural heritage, the peculiarities of military operations, the political situation influence the nature of commemoration? The article uses methods of narrative analysis in film studies and viewer reception analysis to analyze, based on the techniques of contextualization, how the film was entangled in changing the social structure and national political culture. The research is based on the case study approach. I examine the case of one documentary film: analyze the materials of public discussion, interviews with the creators, reviews of film critics, and published viewer reviews. I argue how the discussion of Marcel Ophuls’ film The Sorrow and the Pity: The Chronicle of a French City under the Occupation (Le Chagrin et la pitié: chronique d’une ville française sous l’occupation, 1969) changed the way we talk about war affecting professional historiography, public policy, public opinion. People discussed the traumatic experience of the war seen through the eyes of civilians, whose memory of the bombing of cities, the rape of women, forced deportation, hunger, speculation, and other wartime crimes became the object of public discussion, the borders between “us” and “them” lost their national identity, and resistance to fascism lost its features of a united frontier brotherhood. The film showed that the prejudices that split French society during the war did not lose their effect. It was prejudices, not propaganda, that possessed a powerful mobilizing force, pushing people to violence. The creative experiments of the left-wing documentary filmmakers aimed to show that film and television could turn from an instrument of domination and suppression into an instrument of research on social reality and a form of political interaction. France was supposed to see “public opinion” in realism (cinéma vérité), not in the format of elite-controlled news. Marcel Ophuls made the film about the inconsistency of the French Fifth Republic.
Kierkegaard's controversy with the Corsair