Marcel Ophuls, the Academy Award-winning documentarian, has died. News of his death was confirmed by his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert, who told The Hollywood Reporter he “died peacefully” at home in the south of France. He was 97.
Ophulus made many documentaries about the thorny ethical problems that arise from war. He made films about the Vichy regime in France, the Troubles, the Nuremberg Trials and the Vietnam War. The Sorrow and the Pity, his film about Vichy collaborators in France, was not shown in the country it depicts for 12 years after it was completed. Pauline Kael called it “one of the most demanding films ever made.”
Ophuls was born in Frankfurt, in 1927. His family fled Germany in 1933, then had to flee Paris in 1940. Ophuls moved to Los Angeles in 1941, getting his first taste of cinema playing a member of the Hitler Youth in one of Frank Capra’s wartime propaganda films. After the war, Ophuls returned to Europe. He made his first documentary, Munich or Peace in Our Time, for German television.
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His film Hotel Terminus won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 1988. It chronicled the life of Klaus Barbie — covering the 40 years between the end of World War 2 and Barbie’s eventual trial for crimes against humanity, and how America shielded him from justice because his Nazi-honed interrogation techniques were useful at the time. Roger Ebert called it “the film of a man who continues the conversation after others would like to move on to more polite subjects. It is a stubborn, angry, nagging, sarcastic assault on good manners, and I am happy Ophuls was ill-tempered enough to make it.”
