Marcel Ophuls, the Oscar-winning filmmaker best known for his landmark documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, has died at 97. His grandson, Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert, confirmed his death to The New York Times without disclosing further details.
Ophuls rose to international prominence with The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), a four-and-a-half-hour documentary that challenged the myth of widespread French resistance during World War II. Initially rejected in France, it later became a critical and commercial success, helping redefine the documentary as a serious art form.
Although he aspired to make lighthearted films, Ophuls devoted most of his career to confronting difficult truths. His other major works include A Sense of Loss (1972), about Northern Ireland; The Memory of Justice (1976), which compared Nazi crimes with those in Vietnam and Algeria; and Hotel Terminus (1988), about Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. The latter won him an Academy Award.
Born in Frankfurt in 1927, Ophuls (originally Oppenheimer) was the son of director Max Ophuls. His family fled Nazi Germany in 1933, eventually settling in the U.S. He attended Hollywood High School, served in the U.S. Army in Japan, and studied at Occidental College, UC Berkeley, and the Sorbonne.
Early in his career, he assisted directors like John Huston and Julien Duvivier and briefly tried fiction filmmaking. After success with Banana Peel (1963), his next film flopped, and he turned to TV documentaries. Fired from French television after supporting the 1968 student protests, he completed The Sorrow and the Pity with German and Swiss backing.
Ophuls continued exploring war, justice, and memory through film, later directing November Days (1991) on East Germany’s collapse, and Veillées d’armes, about war journalists. His final work, Un Voyageur (2012), was a personal reflection on his life, released in the U.S. as Ain’t Misbehavin’.
He is survived by his wife, Régine, and their three daughters.
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