Marcel Ophuls, myth-shattering war documentarian, is dead at 97

Boston Globe

6 days ago

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When the film was first shown in Paris cinemas, it was met with shock, outrage, and tears. It stripped away the myth — fostered by Charles de Gaulle when he returned to France with the victorious Allied armies in 1944 — that a vast majority of his compatriots were either open or secret supporters of his resistance movement.
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Originally produced for television, 'The Sorrow and the Pity' was banned from French airwaves until 1981. Conservative politicians denounced Mr. Ophuls, calling his work a 'prosecutorial' film that unfairly portrayed the French as cowardly or worse. 'It doesn't attempt to prosecute the French,' Mr. Ophuls insisted in a 2004 interview with British newspaper The Guardian. 'Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?'
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'The Sorrow and the Pity' used French and German wartime newsreels of Vichy's leaders — Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain and his ambitious protege, Pierre Laval — as well as footage of Adolf Hitler visiting France in the wake of his conquering army. Adding to the documentary's broader perspective were interviews with Anthony Eden, Britain's foreign secretary during World War II; Pierre Mendès France, the Jewish future premier who escaped Vichy imprisonment and fled to Britain, where he joined de Gaulle; and Christian de la Mazière, a notorious Parisian journalist and businessperson who fought with a Waffen SS regiment of Frenchmen.
But the true protagonists of Mr. Ophuls' film were the ordinary citizens of Clermont-Ferrand, whom he and his colleague, André Harris, a journalist, interviewed at length. Among them were two farmers, brothers who fought in the resistance — the older one was captured and sent to a concentration camp; a shopkeeper who took out newspaper ads to explain that he and his family had always been Catholic despite their Jewish-sounding last name; and two schoolteachers who claimed not to remember the cases of colleagues persecuted by the Vichy regime. Also memorable were interviews with the former Nazi garrison commander of Clermont-Ferrand, who fondly recalled the passivity and collaboration of most of the locals in contrast to his previous service on the Russian front.
Mr. Ophuls went on to direct a half-dozen other documentaries, most notably the Oscar-winning 'Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie,' a 1988 film about the former head of the Gestapo in the French city of Lyon. But 'The Sorrow and the Pity,' which was also nominated for an Oscar but failed to receive the prize, remained his undisputed masterpiece — perhaps in part because Mr. Ophuls brought his own complex, profound relations with France to the making of the film.
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Marcel Ophüls (he later dropped the umlaut) was born Nov. 1, 1927, in Frankfurt, Germany, the son of Max Ophüls, the director of the classic films 'Liebelei,' 'La Ronde,' and 'Lola Montès,' and Hildegard Wall, an actress.
After Hitler rose to power in 1933, the Ophüls family, who were Jewish, fled to France; they became French citizens in 1938. When the Nazis invaded, the family escaped to the United States and settled in Hollywood, where his father directed several films. The younger Ophuls became a US citizen and served in the Army.
Marcel Ophuls moved back to France in 1952. In 1956, he married Regine Ackermann; she survives him, as do their three daughters and three grandchildren, including Seyfert.
Aided by his father's reputation, Mr. Ophuls tried to become a feature film director. 'I was born under the shadow of a genius,' he told The Guardian. 'I don't have an inferiority complex — I am inferior.' Critics disparaged the three feature movies he directed, though one of them, 'Banana Peel,' a 1963 detective film starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau, was moderately profitable.
In 1967, Mr. Ophuls directed his first documentary, 'Munich or Peace in Our Time,' about the 1938 diplomatic surrender by Britain's prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, to Hitler's territorial claims on Czechoslovakia. The film combined archival material and interviews with ordinary witnesses of the era, presaging the technique Mr. Ophuls would use to remarkable effect in 'The Sorrow and the Pity' and later documentaries.
'I never take a note or rehearse a question before interviews,' he told novelist and journalist Francine du Plessix Gray for a 1987 New York Times article. 'All my discoveries must occur during the shooting in order for the viewer to share my own sense of surprise.'
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Mr. Ophuls began working on his masterpiece in 1967 for French state television, where he and Harris were reporters. But both were dismissed for their sympathetic coverage of the Paris student and labor protests in 1968. 'The Sorrow and the Pity' was completed the following year with financial and technical assistance from Swiss and German state television networks. Though it was broadcast in neighboring countries, it was banned from French television and shown in only a few Parisian movie houses.
The controversy helped ensure the film's critical and commercial success when it was brought to the United States in 1971. A.H. Weiler of the Times called it 'a surprisingly educational and fascinating experience despite its inordinate length.' The film also paved the way for revisionist scholarly accounts of wartime France, including Robert O. Paxton's 'Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944,' published in 1972, and Henry Rousso's 'The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944,' published in 1994.
Mr. Ophuls followed 'The Sorrow and the Pity' with 'The Harvest of My Lai,' a 1970 documentary about the massacre of civilians by US soldiers during the Vietnam War, and 'The Memory of Justice,' a 1976 documentary that examined the Nuremberg trials to suggest that the victorious Allies sometimes displayed hypocrisy in judging Nazi war criminals.
In 1988 he released 'Hotel Terminus,' which told the story of Klaus Barbie, an escaped Gestapo officer who lived in Bolivia after World War II until his 1983 extradition to France, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity. It earned Mr. Ophuls an Academy Award for best documentary feature. The biggest problem with the documentary, Mr. Ophuls conceded, was his inability to interview Barbie or to show him on trial because of his refusal to appear in court.
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Mr. Ophuls chronicled his own life in 2013 with an autobiographical documentary, 'Ain't Misbehavin',' recounting his early days in Germany and touching on his and his father's work.
Mr. Ophuls acknowledged the contradictory strains that being a Jewish refugee from Nazism wove into his life and work. Despite his dual US and French citizenships and his choice to live and work in France, he also still considered himself German.
In a 1988 interview with the Times, he pointed out that his wife was German and had been a member of the Hitler Youth. 'My brother-in-law was in the Hermann Goering Division,' Mr. Ophuls said. 'I don't believe in collective guilt.'
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