We are now almost as far from the film as the film was from WW2, which requires us to adapt to a very different model of documentary cinema than has since become the norm: no narrator-presenter to lead us around by the hand (although the balding, bespectacled Ophuls appears on camera sporadically), an obligation to discern for ourselves who exactly these interviewees are and which side they were on, a veritable barrage of testimony to be sifted, sorted and weighed. It's clear that, much like Lanzmann, Ophuls was driven to cast his net far and wide, to gather as much information as he could from those who could still remember, including contradictory evidence. Editorially, Hôtel Terminus gets some of its biggest effects by intercutting opinion A with opinion B, a form of cinematic cross-examination. Barbie did monstrous things, but he could also be cultured and charming, we learn, and he was particularly good with animals. It's significant that he was put on trial, but - and here Ophuls picks up where The Sorrow and the Pity left off - he didn't act alone, and it took many Frenchmen to empower this one German to do the things he did. The first half gestures towards another film entirely, cutting freely between former Resistance agents, now in their dotage, as they fight among themselves over who talked and who didn't. Ophuls is forever insistent this isn't just one isolated story but multiple, interconnected stories: featured supporting players include the actual Lucie Aubrac, the Resistance figurehead played by Carole Bouquet in Claude Berri's 1997 drama; Günter Grass, the author of The Tin Drum; René Hardy, inspiration for Nicholas Ray's Bitter Victory; the bosses of the Laughing Cow cheese company; and Jacques Vergès, lawyer subject of 2007's Terror's Advocate. Crucially, Ophuls asserts their stories will often be at odds with one another, which is not to say they're entirely untrue.
Every now and again, though, Ophuls' questioning gets something truly jolting out of his interviewees, often from those who don't or won't talk, or who claim to have nothing more to say on the subject: tracked down to his apartment building, one former Gestapo underling waves the filmmaker away with a blackly ironic "Whatever happened to human rights?" And we gain a clear understanding of the perimeters within which the Klaus Barbie story was permitted to unfold. On one axis, a Lyon resident who, as a child, saw her mother gunned down in front of her tells Ophuls "there are so many stories like this". On the other, a woman who shares a property with a former Nazi shooes Ophuls' crew away, maintaining "It's no concern of mine". Some choose to look the other way; as a consequence, others see and experience far too much. This story is further complicated by the established historical facts. Even as the death camps were being dismantled, Barbie and the amorality he embodied were considered assets by the Americans in the new Cold War fight against the Soviets. "He was a damn skilful, shrewd interrogator," says one erstwhile CIA operative of Barbie, and that isn't the last evidence here that suggests the Americans were only too willing to jump into bed with someone who we've previously heard dunked prisoners in vats of ammonia and boiling water. (Damningly, Ophuls films these functionaries of the State sunning themselves by the pool or nestled under the Christmas trees Barbie's victims wouldn't get to enjoy.) In the second half, Hôtel Terminus reveals its peculiar symmetry: the intelligence community appears at least as divided by the events of the post-War period as those Resistance mainstays were by events pre-1945. Possibly that's why Ophuls returns to the billiards table as a connecting visual motif: the winners of history stay on, and it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt.
For some time, you may wonder and worry whether the figure who caused these divisions and scars - Barbie himself - has been allowed to slip away again. For three of the film's four hours, we barely see him except in archive photographs; when he does appear in person, interviewed by French television in the early 1970s, it's to deny being Klaus Barbie and to suggest that his wife and children having the same names as Klaus Barbie's wife and children is but mere coincidence. Ophuls' own interviews, with those left reeling in his subject's wake, suggest it may already be too late: that the rat Barbie had already gone some way towards spreading anti-Semitic attitudes, fostering a wider moral indifference and, in the case of the Bolivian bureaucrats who welcomed Barbie-as-Altmann, even a perverse pride that they'd have performed a similar duty on behalf of their own country. Any residual hope in Hôtel Terminus resides in the power of hearing firsthand the stories of those who personally suffered through all this, who speak of their torture with a force it would be foolish and shameful to deny, and flinch or sob as if these events had happened as recently as yesterday. Set against the prevarication and self-justification of Klaus Barbie's enablers, that directness still cuts through, and sometimes cuts to the bone. It's a directness born of heightened directorial strategy, a willingness to play the longer game, relax one's interviewees, draw out both the best and worst of our shared humanity, and trust in the audience to find their way through this complex maze of information to arrive at the right conclusion; it's assisted - at the last - by one of the most remarkable interactions ever committed to film. (For all this story's complications, it is finally a simple matter of human behaviour, and the choices we make.) They took these tasks seriously in the 20th century, in a way we haven't quite in the 21st - and look where that's got us.
Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie is currently streaming on YouTube.
