Acclaimed French director Marcel Ophuls, renowned for his documentary, “The Sorrow and the Pity,” which revealed the Vichy regime’s collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II, has died at the age of 97.
The Oscar-winner’s grandson, Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert, confirmed Monday that Marcel Ophuls “died peacefully” Saturday, The Guardian reported.
Ophuls was born in Frankfurt in 1927 to actor Hilde Wall and prominent director Max Ophuls. After the Nazis took control of Germany in 1933, his family escaped to France. However, with the Nazi invasion of France, they were forced to flee again, this time through Spain before settling in the United States in 1941.
Ophuls grew up and studied in Los Angeles and served in a U.S. Army theatrical unit in 1946 before moving to France in 1950. There, he assisted prominent filmmakers and directed parts of “Love at Twenty” (1962) and the detective film “Banana Peel” (1964). In 1967, he helmed a documentary on the Munich crisis.
Commissioned by a French government-run TV station to document Nazi-occupied France, Ophuls completed “The Sorrow and the Pity” in 1969 — a 4 1/2-hour documentary exposing French collaboration with the Nazis. The French TV station refused to broadcast it, fearing it challenged national myths, resulting in its ban.
In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, Ophuls rejected the notion that he had unfairly singled out France.
“For 40 years I’ve had to put up with all this [expletive] about it being a prosecutorial film,” he said. “It doesn’t attempt to prosecute the French. Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?”
“The Sorrow and the Pity” was nominated for an Academy Award in 1971 and famously mentioned in “Annie Hall,” but it wasn’t screened on French TV until 1981. Ophuls continued exploring conflict in his documentaries, covering topics like the Northern Ireland troubles (“A Sense of Loss”), wartime atrocities (“The Memory of Justice”), war reporting during the Sarajevo siege (“The Troubles We’ve Seen”), and East Germany’s reunification (“November Days”). His 1988 film “Hotel Terminus,” about Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, earned him an Academy Award.
In his later years, Ophuls lived in southern France and was working on a documentary about Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, titled “Unpleasant Truths,” before his death.
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