Marcel Ophuls, the renowned, Oscar-winning documentarian whose controversial and epic “The Sorrow and the Pity” was a worldwide success, has died. He was 97.
His death was reported to the New York Times by his grandson, Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert, who provided no details concerning the circumstances of the death.
Ophuls, the son of famed German and Hollywood film director Max Ophuls, often claimed that he was a prisoner of his success in the documentary field when what he really wanted was to make lighthearted musicals and romances. But his exhaustive “The Sorrow and the Pity,” about French complicity with their Nazi occupiers during WWII, elevated the film documentary in the public eye. His further explorations of the war in Northern Ireland (“A Sense of Loss”), the Nuremberg war crime trials (“The Memory of Justice”) and the notorious Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie (“Hotel Terminus”) added immeasurably to the documentary field. Ophuls mixed period footage and incisive, often exhaustive interviews, adding to the public’s understanding of the complex issues his films tackled.
“Hotel Terminus” won him an Oscar for best documentary in 1988.
Born in Frankfurt am Main, Ophuls (original family name, Oppenheimer) was raised in Frankfurt and Berlin until 1933, when Hitler came to power. Ophuls moved to France and, in 1940, escaped to the U.S. via Spain and Portugal. While his father was directing such films as “Letter From an Unknown Woman,” Ophuls attended Hollywood High School, feeling distinctly out of place. He appeared as a Nazi youth in Frank Capra’s wartime propaganda documentary “Prelude to War” and was drafted into service in the Army in 1945, serving in the entertainment unit stationed in Japan.
When he returned to the U.S., Ophuls entered Occidental College and later UC Berkeley and the Sorbonne in Paris. Because he was multilingual and with his father’s help, he was brought on as an assistant on various films by such directors as Julien Duvivier, John Huston and Anatole Litvak. After working for Huston on “Moulin Rouge” in 1952, he helped his father (and appeared briefly) in “Lola Montes,” considered by some critics as the apex of the elder Ophuls’ career.
He then worked for German television, and a documentary on Henri Matisse caught the eye of Francois Truffaut, who assigned him a segment of the multipart “Love at Twenty.” Through his friendship with Truffaut, he was able to interest Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau to appear in his 1963 adventure comedy “Banana Peel,” which was a success. His second fiction film, 1965’s “Fire at Will,” starring Eddie Constantine, failed to appeal to critics or audiences, however.
In need of a job, Ophuls was hired by the French government-run TV network ORTF and worked on the TV newsmagazine “Zoom!” After “Munich or Peace in Our Time,” his three-hour 1967 documentary about the 1938 Munich agreement, Ophuls began planning a film about the French Occupation. In the meantime, he made a film sympathetic to the 1968 Parisian student riots and, after the re-establishment of pro de Gaulle forces in the French government, he was fired for his radical position.
Ophuls then returned to German TV and, with the help of the Swiss, raised the money to complete “The Sorrow and the Pity” by 1969. The sprawling but penetrating 4½ hour documentary about French complicity with its Nazi captors during the war exploded the myth that the French resisted their occupiers. It was shown on German television; the French rejected it for both theatrical and television distribution, but after numerous private screenings, “The Sorrow and the Pity” was finally released in Paris to critical acclaim and played for several months. In 1971, it was distributed throughout France, but the documentary didn’t appear on French television until a decade later.
“Sorrow” was greeted with similar approbation in the U.S. Ophuls’ next film, “A Sense of Loss” (1972), dealt with the ongoing battle in Northern Ireland. Comparisons with the earlier film were inevitable and the issue much more complex than any film could encompass.
“The Memory of Justice” (1976), based on the book “Nuremeberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy” and also ran a punishing 4½ hours, drew parallels between atrocities committed in Nazi Germany, Vietnam and Algeria. The film dealt with selective memory and the Germans’ desire to forget their former pro-Nazi stance.
Ophuls did not return to the bigscreen until 1988 with another WWII documentary, “Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie,” about the notorious Nazi Butcher of Lyon. The film again struck a nerve, and Ophuls was awarded an Oscar and the International Critics Prize at Cannes for his efforts.
His 1991 docu “November Days” was a portrait of the weakening political leadership of East Germany.
Ophuls frequently wrote about film, lectured at universities and served on the board of the French Filmmakers Society. After receiving a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1991, Ophuls swore that he was going to return to feature filmmaking, but instead turned out “Veillees d’armes,” a film about the history of wartime journalists. That proved to be his last directing effort until 2012’s “Un Voyageur” (2012), a self-portrait in which he offered his remembrances and summed up his experience but which was released in the U.S. under the absurd title “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”
He was married to Regine Ophuls, by whom he had three daughters.
