Marcel Ophuls, the Oscar-winning French film-maker whose documentary The Sorrow and the Pity uncovered the truth of the Vichy government’s collaboration with Nazi Germany during the second world war, has died aged 97.
Ophuls “died peacefully” on Saturday, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert confirmed on Monday.
Ophuls was born in Frankfurt in 1927, to the German actor Hilde Wall and the renowned German Jewish director Max Ophuls. The family fled Germany for France after the Nazi party came to power in 1933, then fled the Nazis again as they invaded France, crossing the Pyrenees into Spain and travelling on to the US, arriving in 1941.
Ophuls finished high school and college in Los Angeles, and served in a US army theatrical unit in Japan in 1946. The family migrated to France in 1950, where Ophuls worked as an assistant to film-makers Julien Duvivier and Anatole Litvak. Through François Truffaut, Ophuls directed part of the 1962 film Love at Twenty, then the 1964 detective film Banana Peel starring Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo. In 1867 he made his first documentary, a 32-hour series on the Munich crisis.
Ophuls was then commissioned by a French government-run TV station to make a documentary about France under Nazi occupation. But in 1969, when he submitted The Sorrow and the Pity, a four-and-a-half-hour documentary that exposed the extent of French collaboration with the Nazis, the station refused to screen it and it was banned; a network head later told a government committee that the film “destroys myths that the people of France still need”.
Ophuls rejected any criticism that he had unfairly singled out France, telling the Guardian in 2004: “For 40 years I’ve had to put up with all this bullshit about it being a prosecutorial film. It doesn’t attempt to prosecute the French. Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?”
The Sorrow and the Pity was nominated for an Academy Award in 1971 for best documentary feature; it was immortalised in Annie Hall as the film Woody Allen’s character invites Diane Keaton to see on a date. It was not screened on French television until 1981.
Ophuls returned again and again to conflict in documentaries, including A Sense of Loss, about the Troubles in Northern Ireland; The Memory of Justice, about wartime atrocities; The Troubles We’ve Seen, about war reporting and filmed in Sarajevo during the siege; and November Days, interviewing East Germans about the fall of communism and reunification. His 1988 documentary Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, about the Nazi war criminal, won Ophuls an Academy Award for best documentary feature.
Ophuls spent his final years in southern France. He was working on a documentary about Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, under the working title Unpleasant Truths, for some years before his death.
