PARIS (AP) – Marcel Ophuls, an Academy Award-winning director known for his groundbreaking 1969 documentary “The Sorrow and the Pity,” which dismantled the complacent myths surrounding France’s resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II, has passed away at the age of 97.
The filmmaker, born in Germany and the son of renowned director Max Ophuls, died from natural causes at his residence in southwestern France on Saturday, as reported by his grandson, Andreas Benjamin Seyfert, to a Hollywood journalist.
Ophuls later earned an Oscar for “Hotel Terminus” (1988), but his powerful examination of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie was a profound reflection of “sadness and pity,” marking a significant shift in how France confronted its past.
Initially deemed too provocative and divisive, the documentary faced a ban from French television for over ten years. A French broadcasting executive remarked that it “destroyed the myths France still clings to.” It was only aired across the nation in 1981. Simone Vert, a Holocaust survivor and part of France’s postwar moral conscience, declined to support the film.
However, for the younger generations grappling with the remnants of these atrocities, the film provided a powerful revelation. It served as a stark historical assessment that challenged both national memory and identity.
The myths ruptured by the documentary were meticulously crafted by wartime leader Charles de Gaulle, who led the French forces out of exile to later become president. After the liberation of France in 1944, de Gaulle advocated a narrative portraying the French as a unified entity that resisted Nazi occupation, relegating collaboration to the actions of a few traitors. He asserted that the French Republic had never truly ceased to exist.
Nominated for the 1972 Oscars for Best Documentary, “The Sorrow and the Pity” presents a different narrative. Through the stories of farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, collaborators, members of the French resistance, and even the former Nazi commander of the town, Ophuls exposed the moral complexities of the occupation.
There were no scripts dictating the emotions of the narrator, music, or audience – only people speaking candidly, sometimes awkwardly or defensively. They remembered, justified, hesitated. In those pauses and contradictions, the film delivered a devastating message: the French wartime experience was not one of unanimous resistance, but rather a web of compromises driven by fear, self-preservation, and complicity.
The film revealed the complicity of French police in the deportation of Jews, the silence of neighbors, and a teacher’s refusal to acknowledge a missing colleague. Resistance was often an exception, not the norm.
In essence, Ophuls challenged de Gaulle’s patriotic myth and the oversimplification of collaboration as a betrayal of a select few. Instead, he portrayed a morally conflicted and ill-prepared country confronting its own truths.
Outside of France, “The Sorrow and the Pity” achieved legendary status. It even made a notable appearance in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall,” where the character Alvy Singer (played by Allen) brings his indifferent girlfriend to the screening, nodding to its significant place in documentary film history.
In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, Ophuls responded to accusations about his film’s implications: “We’re not here to judge France. Who can argue that their country would have acted better under similar circumstances?”
Born in Frankfurt on November 1, 1927, Marcel Ophuls was the son of the illustrious German and Jewish filmmaker Max Ophuls, known for classics such as “La Ronde,” “Letters from an Unknown Woman,” and “La Ronde.” When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the family fled Germany, eventually settling in France. In 1940, as Nazi forces advanced toward Paris, they escaped again – this time crossing the Pyrenees into Spain and subsequently to the United States.
Ophuls became an American citizen and served in the US Army during the occupation of Japan. However, he felt the weight of his father’s influential legacy on his path.
“I was born under the shadow of a genius,” he remarked in 2004.
Returning to France in the 1950s, he aspired to direct narrative films like his father. However, unsuccessful projects, including “Banana Peel” (1963) – a caper film in the vein of Ernst Lubitsch starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau – shifted his trajectory. “I didn’t choose to make documentaries,” he later explained. “There simply weren’t any fiction films to be made.”
This pivot set the stage for “The Sorrow and the Pity.” Following this, Ophuls created “Memories of Justice” (1976), a probing reflection on war crimes that drew unsettling parallels to the atrocities of Algeria and Vietnam. In “Hôtel Terminus” (1988), he spent five years chronicling Klaus Barbie’s life, revealing not only his Nazi atrocities but also the Western governments’ complicity in sheltering him post-war. The film secured him an Academy Award for Best Documentary, though rumors of his suicide attempt during its production loomed over its success.
In “The Troubles We’ve Seen” (1994), he focused his cameras on journalists covering the Bosnian War, scrutinizing the media’s complex relationship with suffering and visibility.
Despite spending much of his life in France, Ophuls often felt like an outsider. “To many, I’m still viewed as a German Jew,” he noted in 2004, “the obsessive German Jew intent on confronting France.”
He embodied contradiction: a Jewish exile married to a German woman who had once participated in Hitler’s youth programs, never fully accepted as a French citizen. A filmmaker who revered Hollywood but shifted European cinema toward unvarnished truths.
He is survived by his wife, Regin, their three daughters, and three grandchildren.
Source: apnews.com