Marcel Ophuls: the unflinching chronicler of France’s suppressed wartime shame

The Sorrow and the Pity punched a hole through France’s self-excusing myths and saw something nastier, shabbier, more political and more human• Marcel Ophuls dies aged 97The last great voice of wartime European cinema has gone with the death of documentary film-maker Marcel Ophuls, son of director Max Ophuls; 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. Continue reading...

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