James McAuley/The Washington Post
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Marcel Ophuls, the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker whose monumental works about Nazi collaboration and war crimes, "The Sorrow and the Pity" and "Hôtel Terminus," confronted wrenching questions about conscience, memory and human nature, died May 24 at his home in southwest France. He was 97.
A grandson, Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert, confirmed the death but did not provide a cause.
Mr. Ophuls, the son of celebrated German filmmaker Max Ophuls, was credited with revitalizing the documentary with his unflinching, politically devastating and occasionally irreverent approach to the form.
Never entirely comfortable with "objective" reportage, he often appeared on camera, adopting a persona that was probing and astringent. He aimed his camera and his sarcasm on those with secrets to hide - either to tease out ghastly admissions or to express outrage at their cowardice.
In "Hôtel Terminus" (1988), which examined the barbarous legacy of Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie and earned an Academy Award, he grows aggravated when a former accomplice of Barbie's will not answer his door. He instead takes his camera to the man's garden and pretends to search for him under the cabbage leaves: "Herr Bartelmus? Herr Bartelmus?"
His best-known work, "The Sorrow and the Pity" (1969), chronicled life in the central French city of Clermont-Ferrand during Nazi occupation and was among the first major investigations of Nazi collaboration by ordinary French citizens. The film - more than four hours in length - is a testament to the way even normally upstanding individuals can behave reprehensibly under extreme circumstances.
"It's one of the most demanding films ever made," movie critic Pauline Kael wrote in the New Yorker. "There's a point of view, but judgments are left to you, and you know that Ophuls is reasonable and fair-minded and trying to do justice to a great subject: How and why the French accepted Nazism, and then rejected what they had done, so that it was lost even from public memory."
"The Sorrow and the Pity" featured interviews with public figures such as Pierre Mendès-France, who briefly served as France's prime minister in the mid-1950s, and Christian de la Mazière, a French aristocrat who embraced the fascist cause. But arguably more affecting were the workaday people Mr. Ophuls captured on film, including the elderly bourgeois man who says that his principal memory of the German occupation was the incredible hunting season of 1942. That year, he said, the forest game was never better.
When he rose to political power after the war, Gen. Charles de Gaulle - in a landmark speech on the steps of the Panthéon in Paris - said that France was a nation of resisters, words that became something of a foundational creed for a broken nation desperate to move on. "The Sorrow and the Pity" was a forceful, myth-shattering rejoinder to what had been collectively forgotten.
Following the radical student upheavals of 1968, French newspapers began publishing exposés of sitting government ministers who had also served in the wartime Vichy government. Scholars began examining the extent of that regime's collaboration with Nazi Germany, in light of anti-Semitic strains in French society. But nothing captured or provoked the public imagination more than "The Sorrow and the Pity."
Originally intended for French television, distribution of "The Sorrow and the Pity" was blocked in the country for nearly a decade, stymied by high-ranking critics such as Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor who served as a public broadcasting trustee and became one of France's most influential stateswomen. Although the network had commissioned a historical piece, it followed that its directors had not imagined the finished product Mr. Ophuls and his associates delivered.
"France was far from the country where the percentage of deported Jews was the highest," Veil wrote in her 2007 memoir. " ‘The Sorrow and the Pity' fell into this concert of self-flagellation, and it was on those grounds that I found this film unjust and partisan."
When it finally aired on French public television, "The Sorrow and the Pity" sent shock waves through a society that had yet to come to terms with its wartime past, especially the reality that French authorities had facilitated the deportations of some 76,000 Jews to Nazi concentration camps during the German occupation from 1940 to 1944.
For years, "The Sorrow and the Pity" was shown only in one Paris theater, although it became a cultural touchstone outside France almost immediately and a favorite of movie critics. "No artist in any medium has probed deeper into the moral drama of our century," Newsweek arts critic Jack Kroll once wrote of him.
"The Sorrow and the Pity" was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature but lost in 1972 to "The Hellstrom Chronicle," an apocalyptic film about insects.
Mr. Ophuls continued examining his signature subject matter: wartime atrocities and how societies choose to forget them. In "The Harvest of My Lai" (1970), he explored the My Lai Massacre perpetrated by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.
Six years later, he made "The Memory of Justice," an acclaimed look at war crimes from the Nuremberg trials to Vietnam, featuring interviews with such disparate historical figures as anti-Vietnam whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and Hitler's chief architect, Albert Speer.
Mr. Ophuls received his profession's highest honor for "Hôtel Terminus," his film about Barbie. Nicknamed the "Butcher of Lyon" for his crimes, Barbie oversaw the roundup and deportation of French Jews in the early 1940s and later fled to South America; he was sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity and died in 1991.
"Making this film is like an intense fight for the survival of memory itself," Mr. Ophuls told The Washington Post at the time. "I want Barbie to be judged so that what he did is burned into history and will never happen again."
The film ends with a long interview with a survivor, a woman from Lyon who, as a child, was arrested in one of Barbie's raids and ultimately deported to Nazi concentration camps. As her family was being taken, one of her neighbors, a French woman who was not Jewish, tried unsuccessfully to pull the young girl to safety. Mr. Ophuls ultimately dedicated the film to the neighbor.
"It comes down to that, doesn't it?" he told the Globe and Mail. "The realistic hope is that next time there will be more good neighbors. The possibly unrealistic hope is that next time there will be enough good neighbors to keep it from happening at all.
• 'We must always take sides'
Marcel Ophuls was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on Nov. 1, 1927. He grew up in Paris and then in Los Angeles after his father, who was Jewish, sought exile amid the Nazi rise.
In California, director Frank Capra recruited him to play a member of the Hitler Youth in "Prelude to War" (1942), a propaganda film made for the U.S. Army, in which Mr. Ophuls later served briefly as part of an entertainment unit in postwar Japan. He then decided to enter the family business and make movies. His father was then at his peak, having returned to Europe to create such widely regarded masterpieces as "La Ronde" (1950) and "The Earrings of Madame de … " (1953).
Marcel Ophuls, who held dual American and French citizenship, settled in Paris and worked as an assistant ("coffee carrier") to well-known filmmakers, including John Huston for "Moulin Rouge" (1952).
His first movie feature, the hit racetrack comedy "Banana Peel" (1963), starred Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau. Another attempt at commercial filmmaking, the spy thriller "Fire at Will" (1965), starring Eddie Constantine, was a popular and critical dud.
He began working on documentaries for France's state-run network, which despite its heavily Gaullist sensibilities began producing evening programs on history and current events. A special on Nazi appeasement at Munich was a success, leading to a project on the Nazi occupation of France. That became "The Sorrow and the Pity."
In 1956, he married Regine Ackerman. In addition to his wife, survivors include three daughters and three grandchildren.
Mr. Ophuls, who received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 1991, spent his later years making acclaimed films on a range of subjects, including himself in the biographical work "Ain't Misbehavin' " (2013).
"November Days" (1991) focused on the reunification of Germany, "The Troubles We've Seen" (1994) was a bracing critique of combat correspondents amid the battle for Sarajevo, and "Unpleasant Truths," for which he solicited funds online, was about the dangerous influence of the far right in Israel. The film has not yet been released.
In all his work, he said objectivity was not his goal. "We must always take sides," he told The Post in 2017. "Neutrality only helps the oppressor. Never the victim. If you want to defend your point of view, and not in some way lie down in front of the powers that be, it takes more courage."