Marcel Ophuls

Ophuls was born into a German-Jewish family on 1 November 1927 in Frankfurt, Germany.{{Cite news | last1 = Kandell | first1= Jonathan | title = Marcel Ophuls, Myth-Shattering War Documentarian, Is Dead at 97 | work= New York Times | issn = 1553-8095 | date= 26 May 2025 | url= https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/26/movies/marcel-ophuls-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.KU8.B1vl.Y0ICrXooYO1W&smid=url-share | access-date= 27 May 2025 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20250527022957/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/26/movies/marcel-ophuls-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.KU8.B1vl.Y0ICrXooYO1W&smid=url-share | archive-date = 27 May 2025 | url-status= live}} He was the son of Hildegard Wall and the director Max Ophüls. His family left Germany in 1933 following the coming to power of the Nazi Party and settled in Paris, France. Following the invasion of France by Germany in May 1940 they were forced to flee to the Vichy zone, remaining in hiding for over a year before crossing the Pyrenees into Spain in order to travel to the United States, arriving there in December 1941.{{Cite news | last1 = Adamson | first1 = Thomas | title = Marcel Ophuls, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who forced France to face its WWII past, is dead at 97 | work= The Associated Press | location = New York | date= 26 May 2025 | url = https://apnews.com/article/marcel-ophuls-obit-97-sorrow-pity-62b2980366b5e3327af7537f1d8129d9 | access-date = 27 May 2025 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20250527032711/https://apnews.com/article/marcel-ophuls-obit-97-sorrow-pity-62b2980366b5e3327af7537f1d8129d9 | archive-date = 27 May 2025 | url-status = live}} Marcel attended Hollywood High School, then Occidental College, Los Angeles. He spent a brief period serving in a U.S. Army theatrical unit in Japan in 1946, then studied at the University of California, Berkeley.{{cite web|url=http://www.oocities.org/resistancehistory/sorrowpity.pdf|title=The Sorrow and the Pity|year=2000|archive-url=https://archive.today/20181103100256/https://www.oocities.org/resistancehistory/sorrowpity.pdf|archive-date=3 November 2018|url-status=live|access-date=3 November 2018}} Ophuls became a naturalized citizen of France in 1938, and of the United States in 1950.

{{cite news| first1= James M.| last1= Markham | title= Marcel Ophuls on Barbie: Reopening Wounds of War | work= The New York Times| issn= 0362-4331 | pages= 223, 229 | date =2 October 1988|url= https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/02/movies/film-marcel-ophuls-on-barbie-reopening-wounds-of-war.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm | access-date = 27 May 2025}}

In 1956, he married Regine Ackermann. He noted in an 1988 interview, "...that his wife was "in the Hitler Youth." "My brother-in-law," he said, making the point in spades, "was in the Hermann Goering Division. I don't believe in collective guilt." With Ackermann, he had three daughters and three grandchildren.

Ophuls, like his father Max, preferred not to use the German umlaut in his name ("Ophüls"). Ophuls senior removed the umlaut when he took French citizenship, and the younger Ophuls adopted the same spelling.About the spelling of "Ophuls" in Collection Cinéma d'Aujourd'hui, Claude Beylie, 1963

When the family returned to Paris in 1950 Marcel became an assistant to Julien Duvivier and Anatole Litvak, and worked on John Huston's Moulin Rouge (1952) and his father's Lola Montès (1955).

{{cite news

| last1 = Mandelbaum

| first1 = Jacques

| title = Marcel Ophuls, auteur du « Chagrin et la Pitié », maître du documentaire malgré lui, est mort

| work = Le Monde

| location = Paris

| issn = 1950-6244

| date = 26 May 2025

| url = https://www.lemonde.fr/disparitions/article/2025/05/26/marcel-ophuls-auteur-du-chagrin-et-la-pitie-maitre-du-documentaire-malgre-lui-est-mort_6608397_3382.html

| access-date = 26 May 2025

| language= fr

}} Through François Truffaut, Ophuls got to direct an episode of the portmanteau film Love at Twenty (1962).

{{cite news

| last1 = Cain

| first1 = Sian

| title = Marcel Ophuls, Oscar-winning film-maker of The Sorrow and the Pity, dies aged 97

| work = The Guardian

| location = London

| publisher = Guardian Media Group

| issn = 1756-3224

| date = 26 May 2025

| url = https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/may/26/marcel-ophuls-dies-filmmaker-death-aged-97

| access-date = 26 May 2025

}} There followed the somewhat profitable Banana Peel (1963), a detective film starring Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

With underwhelming box-office fortunes, Ophuls turned to making television news documentaries.

{{Cite news

| last1 = Jefferies

| first1 = Stuart

| title = 'Patriotism is a lie'

| work = The Guardian

| location = London

| publisher = Guardian Media Group

| issn = 1756-3224

| date = 24 May 2004

| url = https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/may/24/1

| access-date = 27 May 2025

| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20140913204310/https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/may/24/1

| archive-date = 13 September 2014 | url-status = live

}} Although he enjoyed making entertainment films, Ophuls became identified as a documentarian, using a characteristically sober interview style to resolve disparate experiences into a persuasive argument. He did not have an inferiority complex towards his father, because he viewed Max as a genius, and himself to be actually an inferior fiction film director. French TV commissioned a documentary on the Munich crisis of 1938: Munich (1967).

He then was commissioned to make a film that examined France under Nazi occupation, The Sorrow and the Pity (1969). The four-and-a-half-hour film portrays "French citizens who are revealed as having been all too eager to collaborate with the occupiers."{{Cite book |last=Hedges |first=Inez |title=Staging History from the Shoah to Palestine: Three Plays and Essays on WWII and Its Aftermath |date=2021 |publisher=Springer International Publishing AG |isbn=978-3-030-84008-2 |location=London |page=81}} The film exposed France's self-excusing myths and saw something nastier, shabbier, more political and more human.

{{Cite news

| last1 = Bradshaw

| first1 = Peter

| title = Marcel Ophuls was the unflinching chronicler of France's suppressed wartime shame

| work = The Guardian

| location = London

| publisher = Guardian Media Group

| issn = 1756-3224

| date = 26 May 2025

| url = https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/may/26/marcel-ophuls-france-suppressed-wartime-shame-sorrow-pity

| access-date = 27 May 2025

| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20250526154505/https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/may/26/marcel-ophuls-france-suppressed-wartime-shame-sorrow-pity

| archive-date = 26 May 2025

| url-status = live

}} American film critic Pauline Kael described the film's impact this way: "There are fragments that in context gain a new meaning: the viciousness of shaving the heads of the women who had slept with Ger­mans is horrible enough without the added recognition that probably those who did the shaving had spiritually slept with the Germans them­selves."

{{Cite news

| last1 = Kael

| first1 = Pauline

| author-link = Pauline Kael

| title = Collaboration and Resistance

| work = The New Yorker

| location = New York

| publisher = F-R Publishing Company

| issn = 0028-792X

| date = 25 March 1972

| url = https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/sorrow-and-pity-pauline-kael/

| access-date = 27 May 2025

| via = Scraps from the Loft

| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20211009225906/https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/sorrow-and-pity-pauline-kael/

| archive-date = 9 October 2021

| url-status = live

}} Although the film was commissioned by French TV, it caused so much outrage in France, that it was not broadcast until 1981.

The BBC commissioned him to make A Sense of Loss (1972). It looked at "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland and was filmed between December 1971 and January 1972.

{{Cite journal

| last1 = Corliss

| first1 = Richard

| title = Film: From Irish Eyes

| work = The Village Voice

| publisher = The Village Voice Inc.

| location = New York

| date = 26 October 1972

| volume = XVII

| number = 43

| page = 75

| url = https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=KdpHAAAAIBAJ&sjid=CIwDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6273%2C1884388

| access-date = 27 May 2025

| via = Google News Archive

}}The film consisted of interviews with Protestants, Catholics, politicians, and some soldiers, combined with TV news clips of bombings and violence. The deaths of four individuals formed the central focus of the film.Yet again, another commissioned work for television did not get aired when it was ready, and it then premiered at the New York Film Festival in 1972.

The Memory of Justice (1976) was an ambitious comparison of US policy in Vietnam, and French foreign policy in the Algerian War to the atrocities of the Nazis and the lessons learned in aftermath of the Nuremberg Trials.{{cite news|first=David|last=Denby|author-link=David Denby|title=Two Suppressed Documentaries: A Happy Ending|newspaper=The New York Times|date=12 October 1975|page=177 | url = https://nyti.ms/3Z1mrJw | access-date = 26 May 2025}} Disagreements with one of his British backers, Visual Programme Systems (VPS), and a German backer, over the content and length of the film led to him being dismissed from the film in January 1975. Legal wrangling that eventually gave control back to Ophuls delayed the film's release until 1976.{{cite magazine|magazine=Variety |date= 12 November 1975|page=31|title=Ophuls 'Justice' Docu At Issue|url=https://archive.org/details/sim_variety_1975-11-12_281_1/page/31/mode/1up?view=theater|access-date= 26 May 2025 |via=Internet Archive}} The film was screened at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, but wasn't entered into the main competition.{{cite web |url= https://www.festival-cannes.com/f/the-memory-of-justice/ |title=Festival de Cannes: The Memory of Justice |access-date=26 May 2025 |work=Festival de Cannes | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20120927202052/http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/archives/ficheFilm/id/2152/year/1976.html | archive-date = 27 September 2012 | url-status = live }} Reflecting back during the film's 2017 re-release, Orphuls considered this film to be his most personal and sincere work that he ever did.

{{Cite news

| last1 = Hale

| first1 = Mike

| title = Marcel Ophuls's 'Memory of Justice,' No Longer Just a Memory

| work = The New York Times

| date = 23 April 2017

| page = AR19

| url = https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/movies/marcel-ophuls-memory-of-justice.html

| access-date = 27 May 2025

| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20170423234621/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/movies/marcel-ophuls-memory-of-justice.html

| archive-date = 23 April 2017

| url-status = live

}} In the mid-1970s, he began producing documentaries for CBS and ABC.

With American funding, he made the feature documentary Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988). The film presents interviews with both supporters and opponents of Barbie's trial, comprising journalists, former U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps agents, independent investigators of Nazi war crimes, and Barbie's defence attorney.{{Cite news| last1 = Goddard| first1 = Peter| title = The Last Word on the Butcher of Lyon| work = The Toronto Star| location = Toronto| publisher = Torstar| issn = 0319-0781| pages = G1, [https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-toronto-star-barbies-cruelty-contin/173254629/ G10]| date = 30 October 1988| url = https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-toronto-star-the-last-word-on-the-bu/173254729/| access-date = 27 May 2025| via = Newspapers.com}} A significant portion of the presented testimony exhibits inconsistencies. For instance, some interviewees assert that Barbie's inclusion in the trial was solely for symbolic purposes, while others contend that he remained free for four decades due to the protection provided by various governments, including the United States and Bolivia.{{Cite web| last = Ebert| first = Roger| title = Hôtel Terminus: The Life And Times Of Klaus Barbie| website = RogerEbert.com | publisher = Ebert Digital LLC| date = 11 November 1988| url = https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/hotel-terminus-the-life-and-times-of-klaus-barbie-1988| access-date = 26 May 2025| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20250527181610/https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/hotel-terminus-the-life-and-times-of-klaus-barbie-1988| archive-date = 27 May 2025| url-status = live}} This alleged protection was attributed to Barbie's connections with covert agents, and a public trial could have potentially compromised intelligence activities. Within the course of the film, Barbie was brought to trial and sentenced to life in prison. Near the end, his defense attorney vows to appeal the decision. During its world premiere, at the Cannes film festival, a near riot almost broke out between filmgoers who cannot forget the Holocaust, and those that wanted to move on and leave it in the past.{{Cite news| last1 = Rickey| first1 = Carrie| title = Emotions erupt: Barbie film creates near-riot at Cannes| work = The Ottawa Citizen| location = Ottawa| publisher = Southam Inc.| issn = 0839-3222| agency = Knight Ridder| page = F13| date = 18 May 1988| url = https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-ottawa-citizen-emotions-erupt-barbi/173259407/| access-date = 27 May 2025| via = Newspapers.com}} It won an Academy Award, in 1989, for best documentary.

His next project was an interview film with two senior East German Communists, November Days (1992).{{Cite news|url=http://www.hollywood.com/celebrities/marcel-ophuls-58834936/|title=Marcel Ophuls {{!}} Biography and Filmography {{!}} 1927|author = Hollywood Staff|date=21 November 2014|work=Hollywood.com|access-date=13 October 2017|language=en-US|archive-date=19 March 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220319201637/https://www.hollywood.com/celebrities/marcel-ophuls-58834936/|url-status=dead}}

In November 1995, the Cinematheque Ontario, in Toronto, held a major retrospective on Ophuls's works, including his newest film The Trouble We've Seen (1994), a ruminative look at how journalists cover war, especially during the Bosnian War.

{{Cite news

| last1 = Goddard

| first1 = Peter

| title = 'Sourpuss' seeks 'truth'

| work = The Toronto Star

| publisher = Torstar

| issn = 0319-0781

| page = B10

| date = 3 November 1995

| url = https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-toronto-star-sourpuss-seeks-truth/173422885/

| access-date = 29 May 2025

| via = Newspapers.com

}} At the time of the retrospective, he complained that the film didn't have an "Anglo-Saxon" distributor and only had a rare few screenings in the United States and Canada.

{{Cite news

| last1 = Groen

| first1 = Rick

| title = In the ranks of the cultural resistance

| work = The Globe and Mail

| publisher = Thomson Corporation

| location = Toronto

| issn = 0319-0714

| page = D7

| date = 3 November 1995

| url = https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/ranks-cultural-resistance/docview/1140805758/

| access-date = 29 May 2025

| id = {{ProQuest|1140805758}}

| url-access = subscription

}} He was asked by The Globe and Mail's film critic Rick Groen, why he continued to make films considering all the frustrations? Ophuls replied:

The one reason to make documentaries is to try to create a context for the steady bombardment of images that plague us. Between real suffering and Hollywood schlock, people are losing the boundaries, and you get films like Oliver Stone's JFK. Take Bosnia, for example, where we seem incapable of reacting to the worst outrage since the Second World War. So the documentarians are the professional witnesses who must still get the message through the vaunted ratings and the bloated sensibilities. We're the resistance fighters standing up for something other than mass consumerism. And if the task seems hopeless, that's precisely why it's crucial. It's much harder to resist in 1940, when you think you're losing, than in 1944. Anybody can be a resistance fighter when the Allies have landed on the Normandy Beach.

Every year the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) screens an acclaimed filmmaker's ten favourite films. In 2007, Iranian filmmaker Maziar Bahari selected The Sorrow and the Pity for his top ten classics from the history of documentary. At the 65th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2015 Ophuls received the Berlinale Camera award for his life work.{{cite web|url=https://www.berlinale.de/en/das_festival/preise_und_juries/08_berlinalekamera/Berlinale_Kamera.html|title=Berlinale Camera|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150214235758/https://www.berlinale.de/en/das_festival/preise_und_juries/08_berlinalekamera/Berlinale_Kamera.html|archive-date=14 February 2015|url-status=dead|access-date=14 February 2015}}

In 2014, Ophuls began crowd-sourcing funds for his new film Unpleasant Truths, about the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, to be co-directed with Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan. In part, the film seeks to focus on possible links between the 2014 Israeli war on Gaza and the rise in anti-Semitism in Europe as well as whether "Islamophobia is the new anti-Semitism."{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/11/world/middleeast/marcel-ophuls-director-of-the-sorrow-and-the-pity-wants-to-tell-israelis-some-unpleasant-truths.html?_r=0|title=Marcel Ophuls, Director of 'The Sorrow and the Pity,' Wants to Tell Israelis Some 'Unpleasant Truths'|last=Mackey|first=Robert|date=10 December 2014|work=The New York Times|access-date=3 November 2018}} It was originally intended as a collaboration with Jean-Luc Godard, who backed out early in the process; Godard makes an appearance as himself in the film. As of 2017, the film had not yet been completed due to unspecified financial and legal troubles, and may not be finished ever.{{Cite news|url=https://jewishjournal.com/culture/219479/film-festival-honor-documentarian-marcel-ophuls/|title=Film festival to honor documentarian Marcel Ophuls'|last=Avishay|first=Artsy|date=24 May 2017|work=The New York Times|access-date=24 March 2021}}

Ophuls died in Lucq-de-Béarn, France on 24 May 2025, at the age of 97.

Filmography sourced from MUBI.{{cite web |title=Marcel Ophuls |url=https://mubi.com/en/cast/marcel-ophuls |website=MUBI |access-date=29 May 2025 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20250529233550/http://web.archive.org/screenshot/https://mubi.com/en/cast/marcel-ophuls |archive-date=29 May 2025 |url-status=live}}

• Matisse, ou Le talent du Bonheur (1960) (short)
• Love at Twenty (1962)
• Peau de banane (1963)
• Fire at Will (1965)
• Munich or Peace in our Time (1967)
• The Sorrow and the Pity (Le Chagrin et la pitié) (1969) – marked a turning point in the French debate about the Vichy Regime.
• The Harvest of My Lai (1970)
• A Sense of Loss (1972) – on the Troubles in Northern Ireland.[https://www.bfi.org.uk/lists/10-great-films-about-troubles 10 great films about the Troubles], British Film Institute
• The Memory of Justice (1973–76) – on the Nuremberg Trials, the Vietnam War, and the nature of war atrocities
• Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988) – winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature
• November Days (1992)
• Veillées d'armes (The Troubles We've Seen: A History of Journalism in Wartime) (1994)
• Un Voyageur (2012) – self-portrait of the artist, where Marcel Ophuls delivers his remembrances and sums up his experience

• Lola Montès (1955) – (uncredited)
• Egon Schiele – Exzess und Bestrafung (1980) – Dr. Stowel
• Festspiele (1982, TV Movie) – Clown
• Liberty Belle (1983) – Le professeur allemand
• Das schöne irre Judenmädchen (1984, TV Movie) – Medardus

• The Sorrow and the Pity : a Film by Marcel Ophüls, Introduction by Stanley Hoffmann. Filmscript translated by Mireille Johnston. Biographical and appendix material by Mireille Johnston, New York : Berkeley Publishing Corporation, 1975

• Hôtel Terminus – about the actual hotel

{{reflist}}

• {{IMDb name|0649096|Marcel Ophüls}}
• {{discogs artist|Marcel Ophüls}}
• [http://marcelophulsdocs.blogspot.com/ Writings and interviews with Marcel Ophuls]
• {{YouTube|rUPE0LO6fZ8|Marcel Ophüls speaking on The Memory of Justice (31 March 1978)}}

{{Authority control}}

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Category:1927 births

Category:2025 deaths

Category:20th-century French Jews

Category:French film directors

Category:Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States

Category:Emigrants from Nazi Germany to France

Category:German-language film directors

Category:MacArthur Fellows

Category:Directors of Best Documentary Feature Academy Award winners

Category:Members of the Academy of Arts, Berlin