PARIS (AP) — Marcel Ophuls, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker whose landmark 1969 documentary “The Sorrow and the Pity” shattered the comforting delusion that the majority of France had resisted the Nazis throughout World Conflict II — has died at 97.
The German-born filmmaker, who was the son of legendary filmmaker Max Ophuls, died Saturday at his house in southwest France of pure causes, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert instructed The Hollywood Reporter.
Although Ophuls would later win an Oscar for “Hôtel Terminus” (1988), his searing portrait of Nazi conflict prison Klaus Barbie, it was “The Sorrow and the Pity” that marked a turning level — not solely in his profession, however in how France confronted its previous.
Deemed too provocative, too divisive, it was banned from French tv for over a decade. French broadcast executives mentioned it “destroyed the myths the French still need.” It might not air nationally till 1981. Simone Veil, Holocaust survivor and ethical conscience of postwar France, refused to assist it.
However for a youthful technology in a rustic nonetheless recovering bodily and psychologically from the aftermath of the atrocities, the film was a revelation — an unflinching historic reckoning that challenged each nationwide reminiscence and nationwide identification.
The parable it punctured had been rigorously constructed by Charles de Gaulle, the wartime normal who led Free French forces from exile and later turned president. Within the aftermath of France’s liberation in 1944, de Gaulle promoted a model of occasions by which the French had resisted Nazi occupation as one folks, united in dignity and defiance. Collaboration was portrayed because the work of some traitors. The French Republic, he insisted, had by no means ceased to exist.
“The Sorrow and the Pity,” which was nominated for the 1972 Oscar for Finest Documentary, instructed a unique story: Filmed in stark black and white and stretching over 4 and a half hours, the documentary turned its lens on Clermont-Ferrand, a provincial city on the coronary heart of France. By lengthy, unvarnished interviews with farmers, shopkeepers, academics, collaborators, members of the French Resistance — even the city’s former Nazi commander — Ophuls laid naked the ethical ambiguities of life below occupation.
There was no narrator, no music, no guiding hand to form the viewers’s feelings. Simply folks — talking plainly, awkwardly, typically defensively. They remembered, justified and hesitated. And in these silences and contradictions, the movie delivered its most devastating message: that France’s wartime story was not certainly one of widespread resistance, however of abnormal compromise — pushed by worry, self-preservation, opportunism, and, at occasions, quiet complicity.
The movie revealed how French police had aided within the deportation of Jews. How neighbors stayed silent. How academics claimed to not recall lacking colleagues. What number of had merely gotten by. Resistance, “The Sorrow and the Pity” appeared to say, was the exception — not the rule.
It was, in impact, the cinematic undoing of de Gaulle’s patriotic delusion — that France had resisted as one, and that collaboration was the betrayal of some. Ophuls confirmed as a substitute a nation morally divided and unready to confront its personal reflection.
Even past France, “The Sorrow and the Pity” turned legendary. For cinephiles, its most well-known cameo could also be in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall”: Alvy Singer (Allen) drags his reluctant girlfriend to a screening, and, within the movie’s bittersweet coda, she takes her new boyfriend to see it too — a nod to the documentary’s singular place in movie historical past.
In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, Ophuls bristled on the cost that he had made the movie to accuse. “It doesn’t attempt to prosecute the French,” he mentioned. “Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?”
Born in Frankfurt on Nov. 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 Montès.” When Hitler got here to energy in 1933, the household fled Germany for France. In 1940, as Nazi troops approached Paris, they fled once more — throughout the Pyrenees into Spain, and on to the US.
Marcel turned an American citizen and later served as a U.S. Military GI in occupied Japan. However it was his father’s towering legacy that formed his early path.
“I was born under the shadow of a genius,” Ophuls mentioned in 2004. “I don’t have an inferiority complex — I am inferior.”
He returned to France within the Fifties hoping to direct fiction, like his father. However after a number of poorly obtained options — together with “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 instructed The Guardian. “There was no vocation. Each one was an assignment.”
That reluctant pivot modified cinema. After “The Sorrow and the Pity,” Ophuls adopted with “The Memory of Justice” (1976), a sweeping meditation on conflict crimes that examined Nuremberg but in addition drew uncomfortable parallels to atrocities in Algeria and Vietnam. In “Hôtel Terminus” (1988), he spent 5 years monitoring the lifetime of Klaus Barbie, the so-called “Butcher of Lyon,” exposing not simply his Nazi crimes however the function Western governments performed in defending him after the conflict. The movie received him his Academy Award for Finest Documentary however, overwhelmed by its darkness, French media reported that he tried suicide throughout manufacturing.
In “The Troubles We’ve Seen” (1994), he turned his digicam on journalists overlaying the conflict in Bosnia, and on the media’s uneasy relationship with struggling and spectacle.
Regardless of residing in France for many of his life, he usually felt like an outsider. “Most of them still think of me as a German Jew,” he mentioned in 2004, “an obsessive German Jew who wants to bash France.”
He was a person of contradictions: a Jewish exile married to a German lady who had as soon as belonged to the Hitler Youth; a French citizen by no means absolutely embraced; a filmmaker who adored Hollywood, however modified European cinema by telling truths others wouldn’t.
He’s survived by his spouse, Régine, their three daughters, and three grandchildren.
