OPHÜLS, MARCEL (b. 1927)

German-born filmmaker.

Marcel Ophüls was born in 1927 in Frankfurt, Germany, the only son of the filmmaker Max Ophüls (1902–1957). His father had achieved considerable renown in Germany before the family, which was Jewish, had to flee the rise of National Socialism; Marcel Ophüls has recalled that his father's film Liebelei (1932) was playing in Berlin when they left the city in 1933 for Paris, shortly after the Reichstag burned. The Ophülses eventually fled France as well and emigrated to the United States, where the elder Ophülscontinued his career in Hollywood before returning to Europe after the end of the war. Marcel Ophüls attended Hollywood High School and the University of California at Berkeley, then the Sorbonne in Paris, where he met the filmmaker François Truffaut (1932–1984), among others.

Marcel Ophüls's drive to expose the truth of World War II and of the Holocaust was no doubt inflected by his early life experience. Ophüls worked with his father only once, as third assistant director on Max Ophüls's last film, Lola Montès (1955) . Marcel began his own career as a director in France during the early 1960s, experimenting in various genres (biographical short, anthology, light comedy). But Ophüls did not find his own genre and voice until he directed an extensive documentary for French television in 1967 on the 1938 Munich crisis. He realized that he could use the gravitas and length of documentaries as a way of telling truths about how important historical moments unfold and accumulate; this approach or ethos would deeply influence Claude Lanzmann (b. 1925) and other documentarians to follow. Ophüls also made certain to include his presence self-reflexively in his films, consistently including his voice as questioner (rather than splicing together a string of answers by interviewees to make it appear a more continuous narrative) and sometimes actually including himself in the shot. This reflexivity can be compared to the strategy of U.S. documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (b. 1948), whose voice is rarely heard and who is virtually never seen on camera.

FILMOGRAPHY

Matisse (1960; short)

Love at Twenty (1962; West German segment)

Banana Peel (1963)

Make Your Bets, Ladies (1965; also known as Fire at Will

) Munich, or Peace in Our Time (1967; TV)

The Sorrow and the Pity: Chronicle of a French City under Siege (1969)

The Harvest of My Lai (1970; TV)

Clavigo (1970; TV)

Zwei ganze Tage (1970; TV)

America Revisited (1971; TV)

A Sense of Loss (1972)

The Memory of Justice (1976)

Kortner Geschichte (1980; TV)

Yorktown: Le sens d'une victoire (1982; TV)

Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988)

November Days (1991)

The Troubles We've Seen: A History of Journalism in Wartime (1994)

Ophüls's first feature film is often considered his magnum opus: The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) is a 262-minute portrait of the French provincial town of Clermont-Ferrand during the Nazi occupation, as drawn retrospectively by participants and witnesses. It took Ophüls three full years to amass the enormous quantity of interview footage that he eventually selected and cut down. It is a testament to his virtuosity that the viewer is left with the feeling that, for all the viewer has seen in four and a half hours, the story is even more complex and inexhaustible than the medium of film can capture, exhausted as one may be from watching. The Sorrow and the Pity is populated with all-too-human characters, from whom several insistent questions emerge: How is it that the Nazis came to occupy France so easily and fully? Does the desire to survive equal complicity? What does heroism look like, and what motivates it?

These questions were so expansive and important that Ophüls continued to ask them in different historical contexts throughout his career: A Sense of Loss (1972), for example, addresses the political and religious conflict in Northern Ireland; and November Days (1991) is an examination of East Germans as they adjust to the end of socialism. With such volatile subject matter, Ophüls inevitably came under fire over the years, from within as well as without. In 1973 Ophüls took on an ambitious project titled The Memory of Justice, in which he set out to compare the behavior of French troops in Algeria and American soldiers in Vietnam to Nazi troops of the Third Reich. But when he refused to draw links between American GIs and the Nazis because he had not found any proof to back the claim, infighting ensued, and the final editing was assigned to another director as a result.

Ophüls was so demoralized by the experience that he vowed never to make films again, but after several years teaching at universities in the United States and working as a producer for American television newsmagazines, he returned once more to the subject of World War II and the Nazi occupation of France; his Hotel Terminus (1988) won an Academy Award. Instead of telling the story of one town, Ophüls tells the story of one man, Klaus Barbie. Barbie was the SS (Schutzstaffel) officer in charge of the Gestapo in Lyons, France, from November 1942 to August 1944. He was finally tried and convicted in 1987 for his personal involvement in torture, rape, deportations, and killings during World War II.

Ophüls once again interviewed everyone from French Resistance leaders and collaborators to the maids in the hotel Barbie occupied in Lyons (the Hotel Terminus), and his neighbors in Bolivia, where he fled after the war. Once again, Ophüls'sdistinctive cinematographic style is evident: his interviews are long, as are the shots that capture them. He does not distract viewers from the speakers by moving his camera obtrusively or cutting continuously back and forth between speakers. He also includes footage of the surrounding landscape between interviews, establishing a firm sense of place, which is reinforced by the title, Hotel Terminus.

Ophüls continued to press basic questions about history, justice, and moral responsibility. He again foregrounded the messenger's reflexivity in 1994, when he made a film called The Troubles We've Seen, which scrutinizes war reporting in Bosnia. As internecine wars become ever more labyrinthine in origin and persistence, Ophüls may find his vision of history vindicated.

See alsoCinema; Film (Documentary).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ophüls, Marcel. The Sorrow and the Pity: A Film. New York, 1972.

——. Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie. New York, 2004.

Porton, Richard, and Lee Ellickson. "The Troubles He's Seen: An Interview with Marcel Ophuls." Cineaste 21, no. 3 (1995): 8–11. Available as an e-document from Thomson Gale.

Thirard, Paul Louis. Review of The Sorrow and the Pity. In Positif 50 Years: Selections from the French Film Journal, edited by Michel Ciment and Laurence Kardish, 107–110. New York, 2002.

Anne M. Kern