Latest news with #TheSorrowandthePity
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Marcel Ophuls, L.A.-raised documentarian and Oscar winner, dies
Renowned documentary filmmaker Marcel Ophuls, who, along with his family, fled Nazi Germany as a child and spent his formative years in Los Angeles before having a cinematic career which earned him both an Oscar as well as condemnation from some quarters, died Saturday in France, his adopted country. He was 97. 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." Sign up for Indie Focus, a weekly newsletter about movies and what's going on in the wild world of cinema. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Marcel Ophuls, L.A.-raised documentarian and Oscar winner, dies
Renowned documentary filmmaker Marcel Ophuls, who, along with his family, fled Nazi Germany as a child and spent his formative years in Los Angeles before having a cinematic career which earned him both an Oscar as well as condemnation from some quarters, died Saturday in France, his adopted country. He was 97. 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.'
New Indian Express
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Marcel Ophuls, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who forced France to face its WWII past, is dead at 97
PARIS: 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 Saturday at his home in southwest France after watching one of his favorite films with his family, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert told The Associated Press. He died of natural causes. 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.' 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.
The Advertiser
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
Filmmaker who forced France to face its WWII past dies
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. 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. Lifeline 13 11 14 beyondblue 1300 22 4636 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. 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. Lifeline 13 11 14 beyondblue 1300 22 4636 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. 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. Lifeline 13 11 14 beyondblue 1300 22 4636 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. 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. Lifeline 13 11 14 beyondblue 1300 22 4636
Boston Globe
5 days ago
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Marcel Ophuls, myth-shattering war documentarian, is dead at 97
Advertisement 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. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 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?' Advertisement '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. Advertisement 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.' Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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.' This article originally appeared in
