Marcel Ophuls, L.A.-raised documentarian and Oscar winner, dies
Ophuls' death, first reported by news agencies, was confirmed by family members. He is survived by his wife, Regine, their three daughters and three grandchildren.
The director's 1969 masterpiece, 'The Sorrow and the Pity,' an intense, four-hour work that made Ophuls' reputation, began as a project for a government-owned French broadcast network. Ultimately, though, it was banned and did not air on television until many years later, due to its searing indictment (or 'explosion,' as Ophuls preferred to called it) of the myth of France's heroic participation in the war — a false if popular version of events that ignored Vichy collaboration with the German occupiers.
Born in Frankfurt in 1927, Ophuls was the son of film director Max Ophüls (his father later dropped the umlaut) and Hildegard Wall, a theater actor. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Ophuls clan left Germany for Paris. Then, when France fell, they settled in Los Angeles in November 1941, where Max Ophuls would come to enjoy a significant moviemaking career ("Letter from an Unknown Woman").
For young Marcel — German Jewish, a citizen of both France and the United States and fluent in three languages —the ethos and landscape of Southern California posed a very different and sometimes alienating experience.
After graduating from Hollywood High, he was drafted by the U.S. Army and later enrolled at Occidental College in Eagle Rock, but still found assimilation difficult, revealing to writer Studs Terkel in a 1981 interview that, even as a refugee, he was shocked by the prejudice he observed toward people of color in the divided communities of Los Angeles following Pearl Harbor.
'When I made movies,' he said, 'one of the things that kept me from being too self-righteous is my memory of the Japanese kids who were in my class one day, then gone the next.'
While his father Max struggled at first to find work in Hollywood, Marcel felt destined, as he often said, for a career in the film industry. As he revealed in his 2013 documentary memoir 'Ain't Misbehavin,' he began his career as an actor, playing, ironically, a member of the Hitler Youth in Frank Capra's 1942 War Department film 'Prelude to War.'
Ultimately following his father to France in 1950, Ophuls turned to making nonfiction films for French television, after trying his hand in narrative cinema.
'My second film flopped, but it was a very bad film that deserved to flop,' he said frankly, speaking about his career in London in 2004.
His self-deprecating brand of humor, tinged with a touch of irony, was often apparent in the interviews he conducted for many of his films, confronting former Nazis and collaborators. Alternately, his tone was infused with contempt, sarcasm or genuine sympathy for his subjects who had been victims of brutality unleashed by the Gestapo or secret police of the Vichy regime.
Ophuls won the Academy Award for documentary feature in 1989 for 'Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie,' which depicted the crimes of the head of the Gestapo in Lyon who, after the war, escaped French prosecutors with the help of U.S. Army intelligence, evading justice and living in South America until he was extradited to France from Bolivia in 1983. Barbie died in prison in 1991.
Ophuls was also known for other documentaries, including 1976's 'The Memory of Justice,' about the legacy of the Nuremberg trials, and 1972's 'A Sense of Loss,' which dealt with the troubles of Northern Ireland.
About his famous confidence when seated face-to-face with intimidating subjects — one interview was with Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect and minister of armaments — Ophuls was characteristically candid and self-effacing.
"He was so fantastically cooperative," he said of Speer. "He even offered to show me his home movies. It just seemed to me to be part of my job."
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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They smuggle deep meaning and layer the layers of discourse into a thing where was also primarily and overwhelmingly colossally ambitious as film, like those single shots in Adolescence and Tim's approach to the montage and the work and the work that you then get out of your actors if you put them under that kind of pressure, like what happened particularly to Jay and Cill and Simz and Emily, Tracey as well, under the pressure of Tim's gaze, which is why he's such an extraordinary filmmaker, because he looks at people like some kind of Dutch master painter.; he's working round people in a room, asking them to go a little bit harder or a little bit deeper, or turn a scene on its head and see if it yields if you try it from a completely different angle, that works so well with political subject matter, because it doesn't just become prescriptive or illustrative. As everyone keeps saying, it's not our message. 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So for me, I think there's something in the relationships that have that that has made manifest in these films. And I'm really, really proud of that. MOLONEY: Both of them are, on the face of it, challenging films to make. And I think the confidence that Tim brings to that just takes so much kind of fear and worry away. PORTER: So let's just carry on blowing smoke up Tim's ass for a sec because this was a very unconventional script, and it posed a series of logistical problems. The level of Tim's work, figuring that out way in advance and in watching his drawings, watching his storyboarding, watching the way he communicates with his team. At various points in the shooting of it, I would say to Cillian — I'm careful not to pay him compliments — but the quality of the work was something else. Never in your wildest dreams as a writer, do you see this landing as hard and as powerfully as he's been capable of here. And he would often say, 'Tim can just get this out of me and this is what Tim does when you get us in a room together.' So I think that's right. It's a testing of and an honoring of the relationships that already existed and pushing it further. MOLONEY: It's worth saying about Cillian's performance, because I love embarrassing him, but it is an extraordinary performance. As you know, you've seen the film, he just nails it. I mean, it just gets better and better. MIELANTS: I really would like to express that we did it really all together. I think Cillian was so helpful in the edits. Of course, his performance is mind-blowing. Nobody knows this, but actually he's a very good editor. And yeah, I think he should be an editor on the side of some I don't know… We just have a good team that rolls. DEADLINE: Small ThingsSteve MOLONEY: We wanted the film to have that theatrical release, and Netflix were good enough to support that, and the nature of the film is such that we believe it needs to be best seen in a festival environment and reviewed in that way… There's DNA of independent film all over this piece, and it sort of sits in a particular space. So we wanted to be judged on those merits. Toronto is a festival that has always been very kind to us, has a great audience. Obviously, we are multinational, but it's an English (language) film, so to take it to North America felt like strategically the right thing to do. DEADLINE: MOLONEY: It's a festival that Cillian is associated with in Cork, and we wanted to do something in Ireland. Cork is obviously Cillian's hometown, and so the timing of it all just worked the way it did. It feels like the right thing to do. We are very excited about that, very excited to go to Cork. And people from Dublin, as I am from, don't go to Cork very often. DEADLINE: Speaking of Ireland in general, Cillian, are you guys making headway on that cinema that you and Yvonne bought in Dingle, County Kerry? MURPHY: Yeah, we are. We're working away. We're just doing public consultation now with the community, and we're fully, fully engaged in it. And it'll take a while, but we're determined to get it going. DEADLINE:Peaky Blinders MURPHY: I'm kind of taking the year off. I'm doing this work, but I'm not actually acting on anything, which is nice for a while. I'm just waiting for Tim to cast me in his next film. DEADLINE: 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple MURPHY: I think Danny (Boyle) has already confirmed that. So I can confirm. DEADLINE: MURPHY: Exactly, so in order for that to happen, every single person has to go and see Bone Temple. 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