Monumental. You can describe it as a black and white documentary about life in during World War 2 that's over four hours long, combining interviews with a variety of sources with archive footage and make it sound like the blandest thing in the world, but from the opening wedding sequence (where, uh, I was legitimately jarred a little) to the end with Maurice Chevalier, the gradual, hmm, darkening of the interview topics and the remarkable degree of observation that Ophuls and his team bring to interview subjects (not being afraid to challenge a statistic in one memorable interview for example, or returning to what an interviewee is doing with her hands as she tells her tale) feels like the film comes as close as possible to showing you an entryway to hell without visualizing hell itself, so to speak, and the way ghosts linger.