Marcel Ophuls, filmmaker who shattered French WWII myth, dies

The German-born filmmaker, who was the son of legendary filmmaker Max Ophuls, died Saturday at his home in southwest France of natural causes, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert told The Hollywood Reporter.

Though Ophuls would later win an Oscar for “Hotel Terminus” (1988), his searing portrait of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, it was “The Sorrow and the Pity” that marked a turning point — not only in his career, but in how France confronted its past.

Deemed too provocative, too divisive, it was banned from French television for over a decade. But for a younger generation in a country still recovering physically and psychologically from the aftermath of the atrocities, the movie was a revelation — an unflinching historical reckoning that challenged both national memory and national identity.

The myth it punctured had been carefully constructed by Charles de Gaulle, the wartime general who led Free French forces from exile and later became president. In the aftermath of France’s liberation in 1944, de Gaulle promoted a version of events in which the French had resisted Nazi occupation as one people, united in dignity and defiance. Collaboration was portrayed as the work of a few traitors. The French Republic, he insisted, had never ceased to exist.

“The Sorrow and the Pity,” which was nominated for the 1972 Oscar for Best Documentary, told a different story: Filmed in stark black and white and stretching over four and a half hours, the documentary turned its lens on Clermont-Ferrand, a provincial town at the heart of France. Through long, unvarnished interviews with farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, collaborators, members of the French Resistance — even the town’s former Nazi commander — Ophuls laid bare the moral ambiguities of life under occupation.

It was the cinematic undoing of de Gaulle’s patriotic myth — that France had resisted as one, and that collaboration was the betrayal of a few. Ophuls showed instead a nation morally divided and unready to confront its own reflection.

Even beyond France, “The Sorrow and the Pity” became legendary. For cinephiles, its most famous cameo may be in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall”: Alvy Singer (Allen) drags his reluctant girlfriend to a screening, and, in the film’s bittersweet coda, she takes her new boyfriend to see it too — a nod to the documentary’s singular place in film history.

In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, Ophuls bristled at the charge that he had made the film to accuse. “It doesn’t attempt to prosecute the French,” he said. “Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?”

Born in Frankfurt on Nov. 1, 1927, Marcel Ophuls was the son of legendary German-Jewish filmmaker Max Ophuls, director of “La Ronde,” “Letter from an Unknown Woman”, and “Lola Montès.” When Hitler came to power in 1933, the family fled Germany for France. In 1940, as Nazi troops approached Paris, they fled again — across the Pyrenees into Spain, and on to the United States.

Marcel became an American citizen and later served as a U.S. Army GI in occupied Japan.