Marcel Ophuls
Marcel Ophuls private collection.
Born in 1927 at Frankfurt but of Franco-American nationality, Marcel Ophuls is one of the few filmmakers whose work has revolutionized the collective perspective on the XXe century: his film Sorrow and pity 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 a pluralist and dialectical writing. Furthermore, 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 a memorial narrative to make visible on the screen the tracking of witnesses and the elucidation of responsibilities. Ophuls renewed the use of the archives and vintage documents, with an art of collage that evokes less Godard than Monty Python. And he invented the genre of documentary of investigation, by elaborating from scratch a cinema debunker to whom Michael Moore and today’s independent media owe everything.
Yet, nothing destined the son of the great Max Ophuls to clout 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 too well the tragedy of history and the sorrows of exile, this admirer of Lubitsch aspired only to one thing at the beginning: 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 create the magazine Zoom, whose smoky debates will seduce France before 68. The success is such that the management of the channel 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 they use impresses, so much so that the trio is asked to produce "the suite": this is how the shootings that were supposed to lead to Chagrin et la pitié began. 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 work afterwards. The ORTF refuses to finance and broadcast Le Chagrin et la pitié, which will be completed in 1969 but will not be released in theaters until 1971, with an immense impact.
These events precipitated Marcel Ophuls into a life of wandering, between Germany and the United States: he essentially works for the NDR in Hamburg and frequently teaches at American universities, where his film is very well known. Because in Giscardian France, he is a victim of a form of proscription, especially as he fights in court to recover the rights of 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 a case-by-case basis, depending on the occasion, which invariably brought him back to the Second World War period. But he reaffirms each time the strength of his gaze, his innovative style and his height of sight, 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 well-known than Sorrow and Pity, these two masterpieces complete and deepen the 1971 masterstroke by exploring the meanders of collective responsibility and the hatreds that led to the shipwreck of Europe, as well as the doubtful 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 the television Rencontre (Lausanne), which then employs André Harris and Alain de Sédouy. The ORTF refuses to financially support 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, made it a personal fight, estimating that this film "spits on France". We are still far from the restorative era of the Righteous... 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 hold 20 weeks on the bill. If the film was broadcast on television in the FRG as early as September 1969, in Switzerland and then at the BBC, it will be necessary to wait for the alternance period before it is broadcast on French television (October 1981). With hindsight, we notice that Ophuls does not particularly prioritize employees to the detriment of resistance fighters: the construction of the film 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 demythologization. He moves the camera, illuminating shadow areas, but at the same time darkens what was overexposed. Hence the risk of replacing one legend with another, which has indeed happened: 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 today without hesitation). One can challenge and denounce this partial demythologization, and the film has precisely been burdened for having undertaken it without hesitation. But with hindsight, the criticism crumbles a bit. Le Chagrin was intended to be a film about the Occupation, it never claimed to give an account in a few hours of all the complex reality of the time, even if, after the fact, involuntary homage, he was asked. And paradoxically, it is its flaws, the questions and debates they have led to, 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 created by Roger Stéphane and Roland Darbois, which traces 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 programme on the Munich conference. Ophuls invents his style: alternating interviews (conducted with enthusiasm, pugnacity and a certain false candor), archive views (this is the first time that Adolf Hitler appears in synchronous form on French television) and film excerpts from heritage films (here, Fred Astaire in a film by George Stevens evokes the carefree attitude of Londoners towards Nazism). Charles Trenet occupies in Munich 1938 or peace for 100 years the place that Maurice Chevalier will have in Sorrow and Pity: a sound background in ironic counterpoint. It is not Edouard Daladier but Georges Bonnet who bears the brunt of Ophuls' evil 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 statement with a photo that shows Bonnet welcoming Daladier back from Munich with a hilarious smile. The historian Annette Insdorf evokes this countervailing effect: «For Ophuls, all opinion is partial. His way of cutting a plan often proceeds from a technique of putting in check, because he immediately opposes a statement with testimony or images proving its opposite.
THE Memory of Justice
For true connoisseurs, this is the filmmaker’s absolute masterpiece: Ophuls raises the question 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 the pacifist students of Princeton, the American prosecutor in Nuremberg Telford Taylor being the main 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 courtesan 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 an architect of Germania, the capital of the millennial Reich: "For a young man, obtaining unique projects in the history of humanity, by their technique but also by what they represent, is such a temptation that I could not refuse them, I believe 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 values my work a lot but my own opinion is more negative. Violence, inhumanity, excess, all of this was present in the 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 barbarity 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, in 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 actions he must judge. Or if he has only won the battle. Ideally, the judgment should come from the very person who committed the crime.”
Hotel Terminus
The genesis of this film dates back to the first weeks of 1983, when Klaus Barbie, 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 updates the American complicities that allowed the ex-Ggestapist to reach South America and Ophuls was approached by the producer John S. Friedman, who offers him to make a film on this subject. He begins to raise funds and embarks on this perilous adventure without true professionalism, despite the reluctance of Ophuls who does not see it as a good subject for a film. For the two men, the calendar is hellish: everything depends on the images of the Barbie trial in Lyon, which is constantly postponed, 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 undeniable that Hotel Terminus was influenced by the movie Shoah. Lanzmann also testifies in this film, which is undoubtedly the one that in Ophuls' filmography confronts the question of extermination most frontally. It is also the one with the fewest archive images and a record number of witnesses, who tumble across the screen in a clever disorder. But the New York Times, Vincent Canby very well reflects the paradoxical force of this organized chaos: "The rhythm of the crossing of witnesses is such that we sometimes end up forgetting the identity of the one who speaks. From 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 feels like he will never be able to grasp everything. The more he digs and the more he finds.” Hotel Terminus won the Oscar for best documentary film in 1989 in Los Angeles.
A Traveler
Testamentary work created at the moment when Ophuls publishes his memoirs under the title Mémoires d'un fils à papa, A voyageur vient dans les années 2010 apporte une touche de mélancolie à une œuvre fréquemment autofictionnelle : écrit sur le modèle du film de Duvivier Carnet de Bal, this dive into the past allows the filmmaker to return to his career, his great passions, his founding friendships, especially that of François Truffaut, evoked in the company of his widow Madeleine Morgenstern... The story of the film is as always complex: it was initially 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 forcefully pass with the Franco-German channel in the same context. The film was selected for the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2013. In these often tender and sometimes grating confessions, Ophuls lays bare 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 remained for him as a kind of compass, as well on the moral and artistic level as in his difficult relationships with the producers. It 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 director’s life. It is also a film he devotes to France, after having discussed Germany (November Days) and the United States (In search of my America) at length: he describes France as his beloved country, even if we can naturally also detect here and there some signs that betray a feeling of disappointment or bitterness, a feeling summarized in the beautiful expression of lawyer Léon-Maurice Nordmann (shot at Mont Valérien) reported once 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’s France de Vichy, translation of the book Vichy France Old Guard and New Order 1940-1944, by the American historian Robert O. Paxton. Written in 1972, this work was going to cause an uproar among the French elites, because Paxton claims that the French State did not resist the pressures of Germany in absolutely no field (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 anti-Semitism was an essential and structuring factor in the reshaping of society undertaken by Marshall ideologists; 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 historical legitimacy. According to Henry Rousso: It must be acknowledged that Vichy France largely 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 despite himself the scientific guarantee of the return of the repressed. Two years after the hectic 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 the Jews, by taking up news images showing the visit of Reinhard Heydrich to René Bousquet in May 1942. As Marc Ferro says, it’s 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-there exposed as coldly the reality of criminal acts such as they took place in France against a backdrop of collective cowardice. He does this notably on the occasion of his meeting with Marius Klein, a peaceful merchant from Clermont-Ferrand, whom he approaches in the footsteps of his store in Le Chagrin et la pitié. Taking him by surprise, he pushes him to admit that he placed an advertisement during the Occupation to let his clientele know that despite his German-sounding name, he is 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 accused him of 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, I believe it is made as well by great men as by small people. (...) So the lightning struck this man. Humanly, it is a very crisp 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 led to its final solution – the terms of elegance and good company seem restrictive to me. This man only represents, in my opinion, millions of individuals and I do not believe that it is demagogic to ask him this question. So one will say, why didn’t you warn him? It’s very simple, because he probably would not have given the interview. And there was no question, for such an important thing, of drawing a blank. Besides, we didn’t do much harm to him, he still gave his consent afterwards, so that the interview could go ahead. The name of the character 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 60s and admire each other. In the years 2002/2003, Jean-Luc Godard proposes to Marcel Ophuls to make a film on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This project has come up against the misunderstanding between the two filmmakers. Marcel Ophuls evokes the reasons for this distance: When Jean-Luc came from the shores of Lake Geneva to the far end of the Béarn, 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 took on the appearance of an absent bourgeois, who is not interested in lawyer stories and money problems. The first thing he tells me upon arriving is "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 reminds him that he had called Pierre Braunberger a dirty Jew... That did not 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 me, 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 of the lake... But at some point I would have quoted the letter from our mutual friend to him. “Jean-Luc, in what capacity do you think you are competent to judge the war in the Middle East, if it is true, you would disappoint 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, your most beautiful film, a dirty Jew, what are you doing at my place? And if we had made the movie, I would have to ask him the question, and if I asked him the question, it would have to stay in the movie! "And who will have the final cut? You or me?" For all that, Ophuls maintains an unbounded admiration for the one he qualifies by taking up Truffaut’s words, of "the most talented among us".
Text by Vincent Lowy, professor of film studies and director of the École nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière. Author notably of Marcel Ophuls, Le Bord de l'eau Éditions (2008)
