Marcel Ophuls, who has died aged 97, was a German-born documentarist who fled his homeland in the 1930s and spent much of his career interrogating the various legacies of World War II; his international breakthrough, the landmark The Sorrow and the Pity (Le Chagrin et la Pitié, 1969), revealed the extent to which his adopted France had collaborated with the Nazis.
The son of the German-Jewish director Max Ophuls – known for such elaborate melodramas as La ronde (1950) – Marcel began his career in fiction, but achieved greater traction with complex, rigorous, meticulously edited non-fiction. In such films as The Memory of Justice (1976) and Hôtel Terminus (1988), the filmmaker set multiple testimonies side-by-side, sometimes corroborating, often contradicting, always inviting the spectator to shake any passivity and judge for themselves.
In The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls spent four-and-a-half hours of screen time – and many more hours of shooting – staking out the town of Clermont Ferrand with the aim “to analyse four years of collective destiny”. Patiently hearing out residents from all walks of life, the film picked insistently away at the Gaullist myth of a country united against an occupier, instead revealing two Frances at odds with one another – one resisting, the other collaborating.
Inevitably, the project sparked controversy; in France, Sorrow was denounced by conservative politicians as “a prosecutorial film” and initially rejected for both theatrical and television distribution. After much legal wrangling, it finally opened in 1971, earning an Oscar nomination the following year, but didn’t air on French TV until 1981; a station director said the film had “destroyed myths the French people still needed”.
Ophuls subsequently made films on Vietnam (The Harvest of My Lai, 1970) and the Irish Troubles (A Sense of Loss, 1972), though the latter was rejected by the BBC. His personal favourite, The Memory of Justice, revisited the Nuremberg trials in the context of more recent conflicts in Algeria and Vietnam, though the project was again beset by lengthy (and expensive) legal challenges; Ophuls filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter and spent a decade on the lecture circuit.
He made a triumphant return, however, with the Oscar-winning Hôtel Terminus, on the life of the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. As free-roaming as its subject, unearthing material both disturbing and absurd, the film ends in one of documentary cinema’s most extraordinary sequences, as Ophuls witnesses a chance encounter between a woman who, as a child, had seen her father carted away by the Gestapo and an elderly neighbour who’d turned a blind eye to the same events.
Though the film sparked violent arguments at Cannes, the critic Roger Ebert admired its tenacity, calling it “the film of a man who continues the conversation after others would like to move on to more polite subjects”. Yet as a characteristically combative Ophuls countered in 2004: “I’m not obsessed. I just happen to think that the Holocaust was the worst thing that happened in the 20th century. Think I’m wrong?”
Ophuls was born Hans Marcel Oppenheimer in Frankfurt on November 1, 1927, the son of Max Ophuls and his actress wife Hildegard Wall. The family fled Germany for France in 1933, taking French citizenship in 1938, whereupon Max dropped the umlaut in his stage name; after the Occupation, they fled anew to Los Angeles, where Max began an unhappy spell as a studio filmmaker and Marcel attended Hollywood High and Occidental College.
Ophuls completed military service in Japan before studying at UC Berkeley, taking US citizenship in 1950. Upon graduation, he moved to Paris, briefly studying philosophy at the Sorbonne before dropping out and working as an assistant director (initially under the pseudonym Marcel Wall, to dodge nepotism accusations) on John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952) and his father’s sweeping Lola Montès (1955).
He made his directorial debut with a German TV adaptation of John Mortimer’s The Dock Brief (Das Pflichtmandat, 1958) before being tapped by François Truffaut to contribute to the portmanteau film Love at Twenty (L'amour à vingt ans, 1962). By now, he was part of the New Wave set: Jeanne Moreau funded his detective comedy Banana Skin (Peau de Banane, 1963), but his fiction career came to a halt after the flop thriller Place Your Bets, Ladies (Faites vos jeux, mesdames, 1965).
Ophuls moved into documentary, taking a job with French broadcaster ORTF, where he railed against the prevailing state censorship; he was eventually fired in May 1968 after making a film deemed sympathetic to the student rioters, though by then he was well into post-production on The Sorrow and the Pity.
After Hôtel Terminus, Ophuls suffered mixed fortunes. November Days (1990), on the subject of German reunification, played as part of the BBC’s Inside Story strand, but The Troubles We’ve Seen (Veillées d'armes, 1994), on wartime journalism and the Bosnian conflict, failed to reach an audience, despite a César nomination in France.
He worked more sparingly in the new millennium, completing Max par Marcel (2009) on his father’s legacy and the career overview Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Un voyageur, 2013), his final completed film; a later project on anti-Semitism and the Middle East, Des vérités désagréables (Unpleasant Truths), ran into financial and legal troubles, and remained unfinished at the time of his death.
During a visit to Israel in 2007, Ophuls attempted to define his life’s work: “I’m not a preacher, a judge or an adviser. I’m just a filmmaker trying now and then to make sense of crises... Life made me, unwillingly, an expert on 20th-century crises. I would’ve preferred to direct musicals.”
He is survived by his wife Regine (née Ackermann) and three daughters.
Marcel Ophuls, born November 1, 1927, died May 24, 2025.
