Marcel Ophuls

Private collection Marcel Ophuls.

Born in 1927 at Frankfurt but of Franco-American nationality, Marcel Ophuls is one of the few filmmakers whose work has revolutionized the collective view of the XX^e century: his film Sorrow and pity has allowed a complete review of our perception of the Occupation and more broadly, has paved the way for a critical vision of contemporary history, through pluralist and dialectical writing. In addition, none of the great movies about the Shoah, starting with that of Claude Lanzmann, would not have been possible if Marcel Ophuls had previously stated the terms of a performative use of documentary cinema, using the interview as an operator of memorial narrative to make visible on the screen the tracking of witnesses and the clarification of responsibilities. Ophuls renewed the use of archives and period documents, with an art of collage that evokes less Godard than Monty Python. And he invented the genre of documentary investigative, by developing from scratch a cinema demystifier to whom Michael Moore and today’s independent media owe everything.

Yet, nothing destined the son of the great Max Ophuls to scrap with contemporary history. Because he fled Berlin in 1933 and Paris in 1941 in his father’s suitcases, because he grew up in Hollywood and occupied Japan during his military service, because deep down, he knows all too well the tragedy of history and the hardships of exile, this Lubitsch admirer initially aspired only to one thing: to make unpretentious comedies. Despite the success of Banana Skin (1963), he had to join the producers André Harris and Alain de Sédouy at the ORTF, to produce the magazine Zoom, whose smoky debates will seduce France before 68. The success is such that the channel’s management asks the Zoom team to schedule historical evenings: they imagine two evenings dedicated to the Sudetenland Crisis (Munich 1938 or peace for 100 years). The mordant and irreverent tone that they use marks the spirits, so much so that the trio is asked to produce "the sequel": this is how the shootings that were supposed to lead to Le Chagrin et la pitié begin. But Ophuls, Harris and de Sédouy participated in the strikes of May and June 68 and were therefore dismissed from the ORTF. They finalize the film from Switzerland and Germany, where they then work. The ORTF refused to finance and broadcast Le Chagrin et la pitié, which was completed in 1969 but only came out in cinemas in 1971, with a huge impact.

These events precipitated Marcel Ophuls into a life of wandering, between Germany and the United States: he works mainly for the NDR in Hamburg and frequently teaches at American universities, where his film is very well known. Because in Giscardian France, he is the victim of a form of proscription, especially as he fights in court to recover the rights to Le Chagrin and the pity for Harris and Sédouy, who claim to be co-directors of the film: he will win his case. During this period, Ophuls made documentary films on an ad hoc basis, depending on the occasions, which invariably brought him back to the period of the Second World War. But he reaffirms each time the strength of his gaze, his innovative style and his height of view, notably through the two monuments that are The Memory of Justice (L'Empreinte de la Justice) in 1976 and Hotel Terminus – Klaus Barbie, his life and his time in 1988. Less known than Le Chagrin et la pitié, these two masterpieces complete and deepen the master stroke of 1971, exploring the intricacies of collective responsibility and the retreated hatreds that led to the shipwreck of Europe, as well as the dubious compromises that allowed its reconstruction.

Sorrow and pity

This film was made between Paris, Lausanne and Hamburg, co-produced by the German channel Norddeutscher Rundfunk, the Télévision Suisse Romande, the Société Suisse de Radiodiffusion and television Rencontre (Lausanne), which then employed André Harris and Alain de Sédouy. The ORTF refuses to support financially and therefore to broadcast Le Chagrin et la pitié on French television: Simone Veil, a young magistrate member of the Board of Directors of the Office and former deportee, turned it into a personal fight, believing that this film "spits on France". We are still far from the restorative era of the Just... Faced with this hostility, Harris and de Sédouy do not believe that the film can be released in theaters. But Ophuls manages to convince them, by involving his friend François Truffaut. Vincent Malle and Claude Nedjar obtain the operating visa in theaters: it will last 20 weeks on screen. If the film was broadcast on television in FRG as early as September 1969, then in Switzerland and on the BBC, it was not until alternation that it was shown on French television (October 1981). With hindsight, we see that Ophuls does not particularly favor collaborators to the detriment of resistance fighters: the film’s construction is rather balanced on this level. According to the historian Henry Rousso (Le Syndrôme de Vichy, 1987): "The film was a vast undertaking of voluntary and conscious demythologisation. He moves the camera, illuminating the dark areas, but at the same time darkened what was overexposed. Hence the risk of replacing one caption with another, which did indeed happen: like a united France in the Resistance, the image of an equally united France in cowardice has been replaced (wrongly, but we can say it now with complete peace of mind). We can challenge and denounce this partial demythologisation, and the film was precisely blamed for having undertaken it without hesitation. But with hindsight, the criticism is crumbling a bit. Le Chagrin was intended to be a film about the Occupation, it never claimed to give an account within a few hours of the whole complex reality of the time, even if, afterwards, involuntary homage, he was asked to do so. And paradoxically, it is its flaws, the questions and debates that they have provoked, which have made the film an important reference, including among historians.”

Munich 1938 or peace for 100 years

In the mid-1960s, the ORTF became passionate about historical programs, particularly following the success of La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV by Roberto Rossellini. In addition to the series by Jean Chérasse Présence du passé, it is necessary to remember Histoire de votre temps, a heavy retrospective directed by Roger Stéphane and Roland Darbois, which retraces the history of France since the Liberation with great submission to Gaullist historiography. The director of the second channel, Claude Contamine, asked André Harris to produce a program on the Munich conference. Ophuls invents his style: alternating interviews (conducted with enthusiasm, pugnacity and a certain false candour), archive views (this is the first time that Adolf Hitler appears in synchronization on French television) and excerpts from heritage films (here, Fred Astaire in a film by George Stevens evokes the carelessness of Londoners in front of Nazism). Charles Trenet occupies in Munich 1938 ou la paix pour 100 ans the place that Maurice Chevalier will have in Le Chagrin et la pitié: a sound background in ironic counterpoint. It is not Edouard Daladier but Georges Bonnet who bears the brunt of Ophuls’s bad spirit: when the former Foreign Minister (who is also the secret architect of the French resignation in Munich) states with aplomb in the middle of the film: What is certain, you only have to look at the photographs from that time, you will see, these photographs are numerous, that we have an extremely sad and tense face, that we are not smiling, but serious and worried, the impertinent Ophuls illustrates this assertion with a photo that shows Bonnet welcoming Daladier back from Munich with a hilarious smile. The historian Annette Insdorf mentions this counterpoint effect: "For Ophuls, any opinion is partial. His way of cutting a shot often stems from a technique of checking, because he immediately contrasts a statement with testimony or images proving the opposite."

THE Memory of Justice

For true connoisseurs, it is the filmmaker’s absolute masterpiece: Ophuls addresses the issue of international justice in the face of mass and war crimes, drawing a parallel between Nazi Germany, France during the Algerian War, and America during the Vietnam War. The witnesses are numerous and striking, ranging from the Klarsfeld couple to pacifist students at Princeton, with the American prosecutor in Nuremberg, Telford Taylor, being the principal one. But also appear two high Hitlerian dignitaries condemned at Nuremberg: Albert Speer and Karl Dönitz. The clarity and sharpness of Speer’s interview allow the contemporary viewer to understand the insidious mix of courteousness and willful blindness that allowed the Hitler regime to persist despite its bankruptcies and irrationality. Speer admits several times that this servile dependence on the Hitlerian system still haunts him. Thus, about his mission as architect of Germania, the capital of the millennial Reich: «For a young man, to obtain unique projects in the history of humanity, by their technique but also by what they represent, it is such a temptation that I could not refuse them, I think I could not even if they were offered to me today. And even if I knew that the sponsors of these projects are bad. M.O. – Were you a good architect? A.S. – It’s not easy for me to say. Andy Warhol said that he greatly values my work, but my own opinion is more negative. Violence, inhumanity, excess, all of this was present in architecture long before the Jews were murdered.” This film therefore raises the question of collective responsibility in the face of history and political crimes, but also that of individual responsibility in the face of the barbarism of the contemporary world. This is the meaning of the moving statement by Yehudi Menuhin, who concludes the film: Today, torture has become international, the means and methods are provided by the United States and Russia and it is practiced in Brazil, Chile... We must fight the universal evil that transcends borders and systems. When I speak with Germans, my role is not to judge, there must be judges, a law and the law must be applied, but I am not a judge. It is always embarrassing if the judge has not suffered himself from the acts he must judge. Or if he has only won the battle. Ideally, judgment should come from the very person who committed the crime.”

Terminus Hotel

The genesis of this film dates back to the first weeks of 1983, when Klaus Barbie, a former head of the Gestapo in Lyon on the run under the name of Klaus Altmann, was deported to France from Bolivia. The news of a trial scheduled in France reveals the American complicities that allowed the former Gestapiste to reach South America and Ophuls was approached by the producer John S. Friedman, who suggested making a film about it. He begins to raise funds and embarks on this perilous adventure without any real professionalism, despite the reluctance of Ophuls who does not see it as a good subject for a film. For both men, the calendar is hellish: everything depends on the images of the trial of Barbie in Lyon, which is constantly pushed back, so much so that Friedman plans to shoot a version interpreted by actors! The trial of Klaus Barbie finally took place from 11 May to 4 July 1987, before the Cour d'assises du Rhône in Lyon. In the meantime, Claude Lanzmann has released his masterpiece and it is indisputable that Hotel Terminus was influenced by the film Shoah. Lanzmann also testifies in this film, which is undoubtedly the one in Ophuls' filmography that confronts the question of extermination most head-on. It is also the one with the fewest archive images and a record number of witnesses, who appear on screen in a clever mess. But The New York Times, Vincent Canby very well accounts for the paradoxical force of this organized chaos: "The rhythm of the crossing of witnesses is such that we sometimes come to forget the identity of the one who speaks. At a certain stage, it seems that the filmmaker interviews himself to take stock of the investigation and leave with clear ideas. At other times, it seems that he will never be able to grasp everything. The more he digs, the more he finds.” Hotel Terminus won the Oscar for best documentary film in 1989 in Los Angeles.

A Traveler

Testamentary work carried out at the time when Ophuls published his memoirs under the title Mémoires d'un fils à papa, A traveler comes in the 2010s to bring a touch of melancholy to a frequently autofictional work: written on the model of Duvivier’s film Carnet de Bal, this dive into the past allows the filmmaker to look back on his career, his great passions, his founding friendships, especially that of François Truffaut, mentioned in the company of his widow Madeleine Morgenstern... The story of the film is as always complex: it was originally a project by the Breton director Vincent Jaglin, whose subject was Marcel Ophuls. He took over the direction, Jaglin became his assistant, and the project became a kind of filmed autobiography. Producer Frank Eskenazi allowed the film to be broadcast on Arte, despite the difficulties posed by the filmmaker who intended to double the duration of the initial order, on the pretext that his friend Fred Wiseman had managed to forcibly switch with the Franco-German channel in the same context. The film was selected for the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2013. In these confessions, which are often tender and sometimes grating, Ophuls lays himself bare with his flaws, his weaknesses, his regrets, and as in November Days, he pays a final tribute to the genius of his father, a tutelary figure who has remained for him like a kind of compass, both on a moral and artistic level as well as in his difficult relationships with the producers. This is an intimate work that pays tribute to the men and women who helped Ophuls in his career and evokes the many missed appointments that punctuated the life of the director. It is also a film that he devotes to France, after having talked at length about Germany (November Days) and the United States (À la recherche de mon Amérique): he describes France as his country of heart, even if we can naturally also detect here and there some signs that betray a feeling of disappointment or bitterness, a sentiment summarized in the beautiful words of the lawyer Léon-Maurice Nordmann (shot at Mont Valérien) once reported by Robert Badinter about the Jews and France: It’s the story of a love that went wrong.

Marcel Ophuls and the historians

Ophuls relied on the work of Eberhard Jaeckel and Jacques Delarue to prepare Le chagrin et la pitié, which preceded by two or three years the release of Vichy France, a translation of the book Vichy France Old Guard and New Order 1940-1944 by the American historian Robert O. Paxton. Written in 1972, this book was to arouse an outcry among the French elites, because Paxton asserts that the French state did not resist German pressure in any field whatsoever (no double game, contrary to a belief still widely held in France at the time) ; that in many cases, the French even exceeded German expectations; that antisemitism was an essential and structuring factor in the reshaping of society undertaken by the marechalist ideologues; that the National Revolution was indeed a movement of conservative reconquest following the experience of the Popular Front. Basically, everything that had appeared in Ophuls' film found a historian’s legitimacy. According to Henry Rousso: It must be recognized that Vichy France greatly benefited from the Ophuls effect, and from the general context of the years 1971-1974. Paxton, more perhaps than the other works published at the same time, represented in spite of himself the scientific guarantee of the return of the repressed. Two years after the eventful release of Le Chagrin, it takes on the appearance of a cold and objective demonstration of the theses sketched out in the film. And like Ophuls, for other reasons, he did not fear provocation.”  In Le Chagrin et la pitié, Ophuls breaks the taboo of the involvement of the French administration in the deportation of Jews, by reprising news images showing the visit of Reinhard Heydrich to René Bousquet in May 1942. As Marc Ferro says, it is the October Revolution of documentary film.

Marcel Ophuls and the Shoah

If Frédéric Rossif and a few others preceded Ophuls in the representation of Nazi crimes as being essentially motivated by antisemitism, no one had until thenthere exposed as coldly the reality of criminal acts such as they took place in France on a background of collective cowardice. He did this notably on the occasion of his meeting with Marius Klein, a peaceful merchant from Clermont-Ferrand, whom he approached in the footsteps of his store in Le Chagrin et la pitié. Taking him by surprise, he pushed him to admit that he had placed an advertisement during the Occupation to let his clientele know that despite his German-sounding name, he was not Jewish. Marius Klein justifies himself laboriously, but his duplicity bursts into the open. In this passage, Ophuls highlights the complicity of a part of the French population, which by the very admission of one of its members (we were all against the Jews) symbolically passes from the status of spectator to that of actor. Marcel Ophuls replied to those who reproached him for having trapped this honest Auvergnat: I considered it my duty to find the author of this announcement because the general ideas that I have about history are neither personalistic nor Marxist, but democratic. I have a pluralist view of history, that is to say that I believe it is made by both great men and small people. (...) Then lightning struck this man. Humanly, it’s a very tense and very embarrassing thing: charitable souls will think that the interviewer at that moment lacks elegance, that I am not a man of good company. I must say that with regard to the Jewish problem – which has almost been brought to its final solution – the terms of elegance and good company seem restrictive to me. In my opinion, this man only represents millions of people and I do not think it is demagogic to ask him this question. So will we say, why didn’t you warn him? It’s very simple, because he probably wouldn’t have given the interview. And there was no question, for such an important thing, of drawing a blank. In fact, we didn’t do him much harm; he still agreed afterwards that the interview would go through.” The character name of Monsieur Klein, Joseph Losey’s masterpiece, is taken from this sequence.

Marcel Ophuls and Jean-Luc Godard

The two men have known each other since the 1960s and admire one another. In the years 2002/2003, Jean-Luc Godard proposed to Marcel Ophuls to make a film on the Isrealo-Palestinian conflict. This project was met with misunderstanding between the two filmmakers. Marcel Ophuls discusses the reasons for this distancing: When Jean-Luc came from the shores of Lake Geneva to the depths of the Bearn, with excellent intentions, to talk to me about this project and that I asked him for a contract and an agreement on the final cut, He has taken the appearance of an absentee bourgeois who is not interested in lawyer stories or money problems. The first thing he told me when I arrived was, "Marcel, I don’t know if you know, but I come from a family of collaborators..." And I know that in the correspondence of François Truffaut published after his death, when they were very angry, François wrote him a letter where he reminded him that he had called Pierre Braunberger a dirty Jew... That didn’t prevent Jean-Luc from making a very beautiful preface to this correspondence. I would have agreed to make his film, if he had filmed reports on Arafat, and I would have made reports with the Israeli left. And I would have liked to punctuate it with conversations we would have had in the Béarn, and on the shores of Lake Geneva, with the little ducks from the lake... But at some point I would have quoted him the letter from our mutual friend. «Jean-Luc, in what capacity do you think you are competent to judge the war in the Middle East? If it is true, you will deny me, that you called Pierre Braunberger a dirty Jew, and this after the Holocaust, not before? If you really called a prominent producer, who produced Vivre sa vie, votre plus beau film, a dirty Jew, what are you doing at my place?” And if we had made the film, I had to ask him the question, and if I had to ask him the question, it had to stay in the film! «And who will have the final cut? You or me?» However, Ophuls maintains a boundless admiration for the one he qualifies, using Truffaut’s words, as "the most talented of us".

Text by Vincent Lowy, professor in film studies and director of the École nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière. Author notably of Marcel Ophuls, Le Bord de l'eau Éditions (2008)