I'm sure I'm not the only person who first heard about The Sorrow and the Pity through Woody Allen's Annie Hall. I watched the two-part film about Allen the BBC showed last week which prompted me to watch Annie Hall and then The Sorrow and the Pity again. It's a wonderful documentary with Ophuls making French collaborators squirm and talking to two left-wing brothers, ex-Resistance fighters who spent the last months of the war in Buchenwald concentration camp, on their farm in the Auvergne. One of my favourite bits is where they go in the cellar to draw a glass of wine from a barrel and Ophuls asks them "Is it red?" and one of them shoots back "Yes, like me".
The bit that jumped out at me this time though is where he's interviewing a German soldier who was stationed in Clermont-Ferrand during the war. He's in the pub having a beer and draws a map on a beermat with the Spaten logo on it (he also talks about "here in Bavaria"). I could be wrong but I think it might be Braüstüberl Zum Spaten, the brewery tap in Munich where I had half a litre of their fairly bland Helles the first night I was there a couple of years ago.
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