Ophùls, Marcel

(1927- )

   Director. Marcel Ophiils was born Marcel Oppenheimer in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, the son of director Max Ophiils and actress Hilde Wall. The family migrated to Paris in the early 1930s, and Marcel took French citizenship in 1938. He moved to the United States in the 1940s when his father was in exile and went to high school in Hollywood. In the mid-1940s, he worked for a theater unit in Tokyo during the American occupation of Japan. Ophils returned to France in 1950 and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. He worked as an assistant to several directors, including John Huston, Anatole Litvak, and his father. He directed his first short, the biographical Matisse ou Le talent du bonheur, which was released in 1960. He directed a few fiction films in the 1960s, including the sketch "Munich" for the film L'amour à vingt ans (1962). He also directed the comedy Peau de banane, starring Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo (1964). His next feature was the action film Feu à volonté (1965), starring Eddie Constantine.

   Above all, Marcel Ophils is known for his historical documentaries. His famous and controversial Le chagrin et la pitié (1969) casts a critical lens on Occupied France. It was initially created for television yet was banned but circulated in cinema houses. Ophils also directed the documentaries A Sense of Loss (1972), about Northern Ireland, and The Memory of Justice (1976), a documentary about the Nuremburg trials and simultaneously an investigation into French and American military activities in Algeria and Vietnam. He also worked for ABC and CBS News and taught at Princeton University. He resumed his directing career with a documentary about Klaus Barbie, Hôtel Terminus (1988). It won the Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique (FIPRESCI) Prize at Cannes in 1989 and the Oscar for Best Documentary in 1989. He subsequently directed November Days (1991), about Germany's reunification, and Veillées d'armes: Histoire du journalisme en temps de guerre (1994).