Marcel Ophüls
Marcel Ophüls has created some of the most powerful, insightful, and determined documentaries in film history. Throughout his work, Ophüls has captured the desire to understand the darkest moments of the twentieth century, and provided a context for approaching justice. Ophüls was born in Frankfurt, the son of the legendary film maker, Max Ophüls. Max, who had changed his name from Oppenheimer at the beginning of his career so that his father couldn’t be embarrassed should Max fail as an artist, held one of Europe’s most important directing positions as the head of the Burgtheatre in Vienna. Max fled to France in 1933 where the family became citizens in 1938. Max took the family to Hollywood during Marcel’s high school years. Marcel went on to Occidental College, UCLA, Berkeley, and then the Sorbonne in Paris. He worked as an assistant to directors Julien Duvivier, John Huston, and Anatole Litvak, before beginning his own career in German and French television. He directed Matisse ou Le Talent de Bonheur (1960), L’Amour à Vingt Ans (1962), Faites vos Jeux, Mesdames (1965), Munich or Peace in our Time (1967), and The Harvest of My Lai, 1970. It was 1971's Le Chagrin et la Pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity) that not only provided a turning point in his career, but one for France, as well. The film focuses on how the inhabitants of a small French city, Clemont-Ferrand, lived during Nazi occupation. Through newsreels, archival footage (including Maurice Chevalier performing for Nazi soldiers), and interviews, the film paints the French in a way that many must have know, but few had seen. The film was banned from French television until 1981. The conversation about the Vichy government, and French complicity, was never the same. Ophüls' other films include A Sense of Loss (1972), The Memory of Justice (1976) about the Nuremberg Trials, Hôtel Terminus (1989) which won the Oscar for best documentary, November Days (1991), and Veillées d'armes (The Troubles We've Seen: A History of Journalism in Wartime, 1994) about journalists covering the Bosnia war. Marcel worked for his father only once, getting coffee for the cast and crew of Lola Montès.
