Marcel Ophuls, the renowned French film-maker whose epic documentary The Sorrow and the Pity exposed the collaboration of the Vichy government in France with the Nazis, has died at the age of 97.
A later documentary, Hotel Terminus; the Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, on the Nazi war criminal known as “the Butcher of Lyon”, earned him an Oscar in 1988.
Ophuls was born as Hans Marcel Oppenheimer in Frankfurt in 1927 to the German actress Hilde Wall and a Jewish father Max Ophuls, who himself was a famous film director in his time.
When the Nazis came to power, the family left for France in 1933 along with other noted directors Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder. In Paris, Max had his son baptised but it was no protection after the German occupation and the family fled again, finding safety in the USA where Marcel grew up in Hollywood.
Having returned to France in 1950 as a young man, Ophuls was to become famous with his unsparing four and a half hour portrait of France during the War.
When it was shown on the BBC in 1971, the JC review said: “The compelling power of The Sorrow and the Pity lay in its nightmarish insistence on involving us all.”
But it was considered too sensitive a topic for France and was not shown on TV in the country until 1981.
Ophuls then turned his focus onto other conflicts in contemporary Europe. The Troubles We’ve Seen was mainly filmed in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo in 1993 during the Yugoslav Wars. A Sense of Loss documented the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
In 2014, when his autobiographical Ain’t Misbehavin’ was shown at the New York Jewish Film Festival, the Forward reported that there was “no evidence that Jewish observance holds any place in Marcel’s life”.
According to the Guardian, for the last few years, he had been working on a film about Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories under the draft title Unpleasant Truths.
