Renowned director Marcel Ophuls, responsible for compelling France to confront its World War II history through his Oscar-winning work, passes away at 97.
Marcel Ophuls, the esteemed filmmaker who dismantled the myths surrounding France's resistance during World War II with his 1969 documentary "The Sorrow and the Pity," has passed away at the age of 97.
The German-born documentary maker, the son of the legendary filmmaker Max Ophuls, died peacefully at his home in southwest France on Saturday. He had been watching one of his favorite films with his family prior to his death, according to his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert. Ophuls' death was due to natural causes.
While Ophuls went on to win an Oscar for "Hôtel Terminus" (1988), a portrait of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, "The Sorrow and the Pity" is the film that marked a turning point in his career and the way France approached its past. The film was initially deemed too provocative and too divisive to air on French television for over a decade.
For many in post-war France, still recovering from the aftermath of the atrocities, the movie was a revelation. It challenged both national memory and national identity with its unflinching historical examination, exposing the moral ambiguities of life under Nazi occupation and highlighting the role of ordinary compromise in this tragic period.
The myth that Ophuls 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 narrative in which the French had resisted Nazi occupation as one people. Collaboration was portrayed as the work of a few traitors, and the French Republic, de Gaulle insisted, had never ceased to exist.
"The Sorrow and the Pity," which was nominated for the 1972 Oscar for Best Documentary, took a different approach. Filmed in stark black and white and spanning four and a half hours, the documentary examined Clermont-Ferrand, a provincial town in the heart of France. Through long, unvarnished interviews with farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, collaborators, members of the Resistance, and the town's former Nazi commander, Ophuls laid bare the moral complexities of life under occupation.
There was no narrator, no music, no guiding hand to shape the audience's emotions. Instead, people spoke plainly, awkwardly, and sometimes defensively. They remembered, justified, and hesitated. In those silences and contradictions, the film delivered its most devastating message: that France's wartime story was not one of widespread resistance but rather of ordinary compromise.
"The Sorrow and the Pity" revealed how French police had aided in the deportation of Jews, how neighbors stayed silent, and how teachers claimed not to recall missing colleagues. Resistance, the film seemed to say, was the exception, not the rule. It was, in effect, the cinematic undoing of de Gaulle's patriotic myth.
Even beyond France, the film gained legendary status. For cinephiles, its most famous cameo may be in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall." In the bittersweet coda, the film's impact on documentary history is paid homage to.
Ophuls was born in Frankfurt on November 1, 1927, to legendary German-Jewish filmmaker Max Ophuls. The family fled Germany for France when Hitler came to power, then again to the United States as Nazi forces approached Paris. Although Ophuls later became a U.S. citizen and served as a GI in occupied Japan, he returned to France in the 1950s to follow in his father's footsteps as a fiction director. His path shifted after several poorly received features, and he reluctantly turned to documentaries.
This reluctant pivot revolutionized cinema. After "The Sorrow and the Pity," Ophuls went on to make "The Memory of Justice" (1976), a sweeping exploration of war crimes, and "Hôtel Terminus" (1988), which revealed the role Western governments played in protecting Klaus Barbie after the war. He also turned his camera on journalists in "The Troubles We've Seen" (1994).
Despite living in France for the majority of his life, Ophuls felt like an outsider. 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 admired Hollywood yet changed European cinema by telling truths others wouldn't.
Ophuls is survived by his wife, Régine, their three daughters, and three grandchildren.
The esteemed filmmaker Marcel Ophuls, known for challenging France's national memory and identity with his documentaries, lived in southwest France, seemingly finding a sense of home despite feeling like an outsider due to his Jewish heritage and complex background. After his death, it can be seen that his movies, such as "The Sorrow and the Pity," "The Memory of Justice," "Hôtel Terminus," and "The Troubles We've Seen," have lingered not only in France but also in the global sphere of movies and television, including a nod in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall." This, even as he felt distant from being fully embraced by French society.
