Latest news with #TheSorrowAndThePity
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
2025 Deaths Photo Gallery: Hollywood & Media Obituaries
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Khaleej Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Khaleej Times
French documentary filmmaker Marcel Ophuls dead at 97
Oscar-winning filmmaker Marcel Ophuls, who blew the lid off the myth that France resisted its World War II Nazi occupiers in The Sorrow and the Pity, has died aged 97, his family said. Ophuls, who was the son of renowned German Jewish director Max Ophuls, "died peacefully on May 24", his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert said in a statement. Ophuls rocked France with 1969's The Sorrow and the Pity, about the occupied French provincial city of Clermont Ferrand during the time of the collaborationist Vichy regime. It quietly demolished one of the country's most cherished myths—that France and the French had always resisted the Germans—and was banned from public television until 1981. Through a jigsaw of interviews and newsreels, it showed how collaboration with the Nazis was widespread, from the humblest hairdresser to the top of high society. Ophuls played down his feat, stressing that he was not trying to judge France, and was just working on a TV commission. "For 40 years, I've had to put up with all this bullshit about it being a prosecutorial film. It doesn't attempt to prosecute the French," he insisted. "Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?" he added. Despite being over four hours long, his film struck a chord with a generation, drawing crowds to the cinemas at a time when documentaries were rarely shown on the big screen. Fled Nazis Ophuls was born Hans Marcel Oppenheimer in Frankfurt, Germany on November 1, 1927, to German actress Hilde Wall and director Max Ophuls. He fled for France with his father and the film directors Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang, before escaping across the Pyrenees mountains and arriving in the US in 1941. He grew up in Hollywood, going on to serve as a GI in Japan in 1946. Returning to France in 1950, he started out as an assistant director, working on his father's last film Lola Montes in 1955. He made an unsuccessful entry into fiction with Banana Skin in 1963, starring the star duo of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau, before shifting to documentary when hired by French public television. Hotel Terminus - The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie won him an Oscar for best documentary in 1989. But his 1994 documentary The Troubles We've Seen, about war reporting in Bosnia, was a commercial flop. He spent several years afterwards holed up in southern France not working. His return with Un voyageur, a travelogue, in 2013, packed the cinema at the Cannes Film Festival. He was philosophical about the influence of his father. "It helped me to get work. More than anything, it helped me to be modest about my achievements. I was born under the shadow of a genius, and that spared me from being vain," he said.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Marcel Ophuls, Oscar-Winning Director of ‘The Sorrow and the Pity,' Dies at 97
Marcel Ophuls, the documentary filmmaker behind the incisive WWII films 'The Sorrow and the Pity' and 'Hotel Terminus,' has died at his home in France at the age of 97, according to the Associated Press. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, Ophuls fled his home country in 1933 following the rise of the Nazis with his family, including famed director Max Ophuls. The family stayed in France until the Nazis invaded in 1940, eventually arriving in Los Angeles just as the U.S. entered the war in December 1941. After graduating from Occidental College and UC Berkeley, Ophuls returned with his family to France in 1950 and entered the film industry, working with directors such as Julien Duvivier, John Huston and Francois Truffaut well into the mid 1960s. But his claim to fame started when he pivoted to documentary filmmaking and television news reporting following a series of box office disappointments. In 1969, he released his groundbreaking, iconoclastic film 'The Sorrow and the Pity,' which interviewed everyday French people as well as officers during WWII about life inside Nazi-occupied France. 'The Sorrow and the Pity' was credited for being the first documentary to critically examine France's response as a nation to the threat of the Nazis, examining how everyday people respond to the threat of tyranny and how difficult it can be to speak out and act against it. It ran contrary to France's postwar self-image of itself as one where defiance was widespread despite the collaboration of leaders like Marshall Phillippe Petain, and instead presented an image of France where collaboration and complicity with Hitler's forces could be seen amongst everyday the film was commissioned for a government-run TV station, executive Jean-Jacques de Bresson refused to air the film because it 'destroys myths that the people of France still need.' The film was not publicly released in theaters until a few months after the death of French president and resistance leader Charles de Gaulle in November 1970 and wasn't aired on TV until 1981. Still, the film was well-received abroad, winning a BAFTA and earning an Oscar nomination. Ophuls later won an Academy Award for his 1988 documentary 'Hotel Terminus,' which recounted the story of Nazi Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie. The officer was accused of torturing Jews and French Resistance members personally while serving as the head of the Gestapo in Lyon, with the film's name derived from the hotel where he was accused of committing his war crimes. Through interviews with torture survivors, eyewitnesses, journalists, investigators, and former government officials, 'Hotel Terminus' recounted not only Barbie's accused crimes, but also his escape to Bolivia with the help of American counterintelligence officials who saw him as an asset against the spread of communism. Barbie was arrested in 1983 and extradited to France, where he was sentenced to life in prison. In 'Hotel Terminus,' Ophuls highlights the contradicting descriptions of Barbie, with descriptions from survivors of how he tortured them alongside those who spoke fondly of him and how he was useful to the Allied nations after the war, particularly to the U.S. Roger Ebert praised the film as 'the film of a man who continues the conversation after others would like to move on to more polite subjects.' In 2015, Ophuls received the Berlinale Camera award at the Berlin Film Festival in recognition of his life's work. One of the last projects of his career, and which went unfinished, was a film in which he had intended to explore Israel's occupation of Palestine alongside Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan. Ophuls is is survived by his wife, Régine, their three daughters, and three grandchildren. The post Marcel Ophuls, Oscar-Winning Director of 'The Sorrow and the Pity,' Dies at 97 appeared first on TheWrap.
South Wales Guardian
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- South Wales Guardian
Marcel Ophuls, filmmaker who forced France to face wartime past, dies aged 97
The German-born filmmaker, who was the son of legendary filmmaker Max Ophuls, died on Saturday at his home in southwest France of natural causes, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert told The Hollywood Reporter. Though Ophuls would later win an Oscar for Hotel 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 the way France confronted its past. Deemed too provocative, too divisive, it was banned from French television for more than a decade. French broadcast executives said it 'destroyed the myths the French still need'. It would not air nationally until 1981. Simone Veil, Holocaust survivor and moral conscience of postwar France, refused to support it. 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 French Republic, he insisted, had never ceased to exist. The Sorrow And The Pity, which was nominated for the 1972 Oscar for Best Documentary, told a different story. Filmed in stark black and white and stretching over four and a half hours, the documentary 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. Resistance, The Sorrow And The Pity seemed to say, was the exception not the rule. It was, in effect, the cinematic undoing of de Gaulle's patriotic myth, that France had resisted as one, and that collaboration was the betrayal of a few. Ophuls showed instead a nation morally divided and unready to confront its own reflection. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, Ophuls bristled at the charge that he had made the film to accuse. 'It doesn't attempt to prosecute the French,' he 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, director of La Ronde, Letter From An Unknown Woman, and Lola Montes. 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 Pyrenees into Spain, and on to the United States. Marcel 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. 'I was born under the shadow of a genius,' Ophuls said in 2004. 'I don't have an inferiority complex, I am inferior.' He returned to France in the 1950s hoping to direct fiction, like his father. But after several poorly received features, including Banana Peel (1963), an Ernst Lubitsch-style caper starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau, his path shifted. 'I didn't choose to make documentaries,' he told The Guardian. 'There was no vocation. Each one was an assignment.' That reluctant shift changed cinema. 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 with atrocities in Algeria and Vietnam. In Hotel 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. Despite living in France for most of his life, he often felt like an outsider. 'Most of them still think of me as a German Jew,' he said in 2004, 'an obsessive German Jew who wants to bash France.' 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 would not. He is survived by his wife, Regine, their three daughters and three grandchildren.
North Wales Chronicle
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- North Wales Chronicle
Marcel Ophuls, filmmaker who forced France to face wartime past, dies aged 97
The German-born filmmaker, who was the son of legendary filmmaker Max Ophuls, died on Saturday at his home in southwest France of natural causes, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert told The Hollywood Reporter. Though Ophuls would later win an Oscar for Hotel 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 the way France confronted its past. Deemed too provocative, too divisive, it was banned from French television for more than a decade. French broadcast executives said it 'destroyed the myths the French still need'. It would not air nationally until 1981. Simone Veil, Holocaust survivor and moral conscience of postwar France, refused to support it. 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 French Republic, he insisted, had never ceased to exist. The Sorrow And The Pity, which was nominated for the 1972 Oscar for Best Documentary, told a different story. Filmed in stark black and white and stretching over four and a half hours, the documentary 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. Resistance, The Sorrow And The Pity seemed to say, was the exception not the rule. It was, in effect, the cinematic undoing of de Gaulle's patriotic myth, that France had resisted as one, and that collaboration was the betrayal of a few. Ophuls showed instead a nation morally divided and unready to confront its own reflection. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, Ophuls bristled at the charge that he had made the film to accuse. 'It doesn't attempt to prosecute the French,' he 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, director of La Ronde, Letter From An Unknown Woman, and Lola Montes. 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 Pyrenees into Spain, and on to the United States. Marcel 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. 'I was born under the shadow of a genius,' Ophuls said in 2004. 'I don't have an inferiority complex, I am inferior.' He returned to France in the 1950s hoping to direct fiction, like his father. But after several poorly received features, including Banana Peel (1963), an Ernst Lubitsch-style caper starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau, his path shifted. 'I didn't choose to make documentaries,' he told The Guardian. 'There was no vocation. Each one was an assignment.' That reluctant shift changed cinema. 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 with atrocities in Algeria and Vietnam. In Hotel 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. Despite living in France for most of his life, he often felt like an outsider. 'Most of them still think of me as a German Jew,' he said in 2004, 'an obsessive German Jew who wants to bash France.' 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 would not. He is survived by his wife, Regine, their three daughters and three grandchildren.
