Marcel Ophuls, Oscar-winning film-maker of The Sorrow and the Pity, dies elderly 97

Marcel Ophuls, the Oscar-winning French film-maker whose documentary The Sorrow and the Pity exposed the reality of the Vichy authorities’s collaboration with Nazi Germany throughout the second one global struggle, has died elderly 97.

Ophuls “died peacefully” on Saturday, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert showed on Monday.

Ophuls used to be born in Frankfurt in 1927, to the German actor Hilde Wall and the famend German Jewish director Max Ophuls. The circle of relatives fled Germany for France after the Nazi celebration got here to energy in 1933, then fled the Nazis once more as they invaded France, crossing the Pyrenees into Spain and travelling directly to the United States, arriving in 1941.

Ophuls completed highschool and faculty in Los Angeles, and served in a US military theatrical unit in Japan in 1946. The circle of relatives migrated to France in 1950, the place Ophuls labored as an assistant to film-makers Julien Duvivier and Anatole Litvak. Through François Truffaut, Ophuls directed a part of the 1962 movie Love at Twenty, then the 1964 detective movie Banana Peel starring Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo. In 1867 he made his first documentary, a 32-hour collection at the Munich disaster.

Ophuls used to be then commissioned through a French government-run TV station to make a documentary about France below Nazi profession. But in 1969, when he submitted The Sorrow and the Pity, a four-and-a-half-hour documentary that revealed the level of French collaboration with the Nazis, the station refused to display it and it used to be banned; a community head later advised a central authority committee that the movie “destroys myths that the people of France still need”.

Ophuls rejected any grievance that he had unfairly singled out France, telling the Guardian in 2004: “For 40 years I’ve had to put up with all this bullshit about it being a prosecutorial film. 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 used to be nominated for an Academy Award in 1971 for very best documentary function; it used to be immortalised in Annie Hall because the movie Woody Allen’s personality invitations Diane Keaton to peer on a date. It used to be no longer screened on French tv till 1981.

Ophuls returned over and over again to warfare in documentaries, together with A Sense of Loss, in regards to the Troubles in Northern Ireland; The Memory of Justice, about wartime atrocities; The Troubles We’ve Seen, about struggle reporting and filmed in Sarajevo throughout the siege; and November Days, interviewing East Germans in regards to the fall of communism and reunification. His 1988 documentary Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, in regards to the Nazi struggle legal, received Ophuls an Academy Award for very best documentary function.

Ophuls spent his ultimate years in southern France. He used to be running on a documentary about Israel’s profession of the Palestinian territories, below the running identify Unpleasant Truths, for some years earlier than his loss of life.