Filmmaker who forced France to face its WWII past dies

West Australian

27-05-2025

Marcel Ophuls, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker whose landmark 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity shattered the comforting myth that most of France had resisted the Nazis during World War II, has died at 97.
The German-born filmmaker, who was the son of legendary filmmaker Max Ophuls, died on Saturday at his home in southwest France after watching one of his favourite films with his family, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert told The Associated Press.
Though Ophuls would later win an Oscar for Hôtel Terminus (1988), his searing portrait of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, it was The Sorrow and the Pity, that marked a turning point - not only in his career, but in how France confronted its past.
Deemed too provocative, too divisive, it was banned from French television for over a decade.
French broadcast executives said it "destroyed the myths the French still need" and did not air nationally until 1981.
But for a younger generation in a country still recovering physically and psychologically from the aftermath of the atrocities, the movie was a revelation - an unflinching historical reckoning that challenged both national memory and national identity.
The myth it punctured had been carefully constructed by Charles de Gaulle, the wartime general who led Free French forces from exile and later became president.
In the aftermath of France's liberation in 1944, de Gaulle promoted a version of events in which the French had resisted Nazi occupation as one people, united in dignity and defiance.
Collaboration was portrayed as the work of a few traitors.
The Sorrow and the Pity, which was nominated for the 1972 Oscar for Best Documentary, told a different story: the film turned its lens on Clermont-Ferrand, a provincial town at the heart of France.
Through long, unvarnished interviews with farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, collaborators, members of the French Resistance - even the town's former Nazi commander - Ophuls laid bare the moral ambiguities of life under occupation.
There was no narrator, no music, no guiding hand to shape the audience's emotions - just people speaking plainly, awkwardly, sometimes defensively.
They remembered, justified and hesitated. And in those silences and contradictions, the film delivered its most devastating message: that France's wartime story was not one of widespread resistance but of ordinary compromise - driven by fear, self-preservation, opportunism, and, at times, quiet complicity.
The film revealed how French police had aided in the deportation of Jews. How neighbours stayed silent. How teachers claimed not to recall missing colleagues. How many had simply got by, with resistance being the exception - not the rule.
In a 2004 interview Ophuls said. "Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?"
Born in Frankfurt on November 1, 1927, Marcel Ophuls was the son of legendary German-Jewish filmmaker Max Ophuls and when Hitler came to power in 1933, the family fled Germany for France. In 1940, as Nazi troops approached Paris, they fled again — across the rugged Pyrenees into Spain, and on to the United States.
Many years later, Ophuls settled in a home overlooking those mountains.
He became an American citizen and later served as a US Army GI in occupied Japan. But it was his father's towering legacy that shaped his early path.
He returned to France in the 1950s hoping to direct fiction, like his father. But after several poorly received features his path shifted to documentaries.
After The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls followed with The Memory of Justice (1976), a sweeping meditation on war crimes that examined Nuremberg but also drew uncomfortable parallels to atrocities in Algeria and Vietnam.
In Hôtel Terminus (1988), he spent five years tracking the life of Klaus Barbie, the so-called "Butcher of Lyon", exposing not just his Nazi crimes but the role Western governments played in protecting him after the war.
The film won him his Academy Award for Best Documentary but, overwhelmed by its darkness, French media reported that he attempted suicide during production.
In The Troubles We've Seen (1994), he turned his camera on journalists covering the war in Bosnia, and on the media's uneasy relationship with suffering and spectacle.
He was a man of contradictions: a Jewish exile married to a German woman who had once belonged to the Hitler Youth; a French citizen never fully embraced; a filmmaker who adored Hollywood, but changed European cinema by telling truths others wouldn't.
He is survived by his wife, Régine, their three daughters, and three grandchildren.
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