The last great voice of wartime European cinema has gone with the death of documentary film-maker Marcel Ophuls, son of director Max Ophuls, reports The Guardian.
He was born in Germany, fled to France with the rise of Hitler, fled again to the US with the Nazi invasion and then returned to France after the war. He therefore had an almost ideal background for a nuanced, detached perspective on the impossibly (and enduringly) painful subject of French collaboration with the Nazis during the second world war.
This was the basis of his four-and-a-half hour masterpiece The Sorrow and the Pity from 1969, commissioned by French TV (which refused to screen it); however, it gained an Oscar nomination and its international reputation grew from there. The film was in two parts, The Collapse, about the invasion, and The Choice, about the factional splits on the subject of resistance. It was an unflinchingly tactless and powerful look at what amounted to France’s traumatised recovered memories.
For decades since 1945, France had been content to see its wartime self as martyred and embattled, enduring occupation as a tragic reversal, an almost spiritual ordeal like the trial of Joan of Arc. And for the most part, its former allies gallantly participated in this view – especially the British, who for all their Churchillian euphoria, were quietly aware that if things had gone differently, they too might have collaborated with the invader. One of the most remarkable parts of The Sorrow and the Pity is the interview given on the subject in fluent French by Anthony Eden (who audiences might have then known chiefly as the prime minister who partnered with the French over the Suez fiasco). Ophuls shows him as genial, clubbable, worldly and rather melancholy.
See more of this report from The Guardian, and its obituary of Marcel Ophuls.