Background
Ophuls, Marcel was born on November 1, 1927 in Frankfurt, Germany. Came to the United States, 1947, naturalized, 1950. Son of Max and Hilda (Wall) Oppenheimer.
Ophuls, Marcel was born on November 1, 1927 in Frankfurt, Germany. Came to the United States, 1947, naturalized, 1950. Son of Max and Hilda (Wall) Oppenheimer.
He went with his father to France in 1933, and then to America in 1941, as the survival of Jews became more threatened. And just as he commands several languages and understands many national insecurities, so Ophiils is happy in English and attracted to American culture. He attended Hollywood High School and he served from 1945 to 1947 in the Far East in the American army. He dropped out of the Sorbonne when it denied his proposed doctoral thesis—on the links between fashion and philosophy—and, in the seventies, a brief service at GBS ended when the network wanted him to make a conventional program on McCarthyism, rather than an essay entitled “Fred Astaire and the Protestant Work Ethic.’’
As an adolescent, he appeared in Frank Capra’s Prelude to War (42), and in the fifties he was an assistant to John Huston, on Moulin Rouge (53), and to his father, on Lola Montés (55). He worked for a German TV station and came into movies on the tail end of the New Wave. His French features are not notable, and in 1967 he joined OHTF and made a thirtv-two-hour documentary on the 1938 Munich crisis, using newsreel and interviews with participants. That has always been his method, with the aim of creating an intricate web of contrary or unresolved opinions that slowly turn into historical argument and pleas for rational, judicial compromise. The visual sense is neither strong nor cultivated: TV’s influence shows there. Time and again, one needs to listen to view's and test statements rather than appreciate an exposed person. That may show a lack of flair, a prohibition of melodrama, or thorough investigative caution. It also pertains to the thought that it is safer to like people than to trust them—an implicit conclusion of Max’s films and a cautionary enough attitude for any filmmaker to dissolve boundaries of fact and fiction. It serves to make the length of Marcel’s films a considerable obstacle—proof of worthiness or necessaiy fullness? One conclusion from his best films is that the topics he has chosen demand book treatment, and that it is risky to give any hint in film’s decisiveness that a solution is possible.
The Sorrow and the Pity deals with the German occupation of France, and the variety of moral reactions off ered by the French; A Sense of Loss, with the Irish problem; and The Memory of justice, with the practice and philosophy of war crimes and retribution. The first is far and away the best because it is so intriguing a picture of everyday hypocrisy and compromise—superb
subjects for film, since the straight face cannot quite hide its duplicity. A Sense of Loss seems the least sure oi all its historical facts, and much more vulnerable to the shrill pleading of its interested parties. To the extent that it is the most partial of his films, it is the weakest and the most open to challenge. The Memory of Justice is an elaborate, worthy essay that stumbles in the attempt to find a coherent pattern in different war crimes—chiefly, the German and the Japanese from 1939 to 1945, and the American in Vietnam. Earnestness easily seems didactic, and Oplnils is well aware of how readily film can distort ideas and load facts. lie may be the victim of the size and intractability of the subject, and of the scant human ground it refers to. The local flavor of The Sorrow and the Pity is its greatest asset, just as the film is more touching because it does not leave an impossible question for the viewer to answer. The French film makes us realize how we might have behaved from day to day, but The Memory of Justice confronts us with so great a dilemma that it is easier to fall asleep. Film records surfaces and moments too avidly for it to be much help in forming the wisdom that can settle issues. You go along with film or bend to its suggestion; you do not assume the certainty of a judge.
Hotel Terminus was better than anything that had gone before—rich, complex, humane, mysterious, and determinedly calm. It was also France, again, a country whose lies and truth Oplnils finds especially intriguing. In Ophiils’s documentaries, film has shown an ability to contribute to the large cause of histoiy that leaves in question even the best fictional war films—as well as the daily grind of TV news.
His most recent film is a study of the journalistic process in Sarajevo and Yugoslavia, not as searching as his best work, but more filled with immediate pain.
(Book by Ophuls, Marcel)
Served with Army of the United States, 1946-1947. Member German Academy Arts, French Authors Guild, French Directors Guild, American Academy Arts and Sciences.
The itinerant life Marcel Ophiils led as a child has surelv affected the political and philosophical discrimination of most of his documentaries. Their chief target is nationalist confidence, and the crimes done in its name. Their obvious, but decent and hard-earned, message is for individual responsibility that will resist the surge of right-eousness, especially when it calls itself manifest destinv. No personal ideological allegiance shows in Ophiils’s work. His pictures have the dogged tone and density of a lawyer’s self-examination. Stylistic flourishes and rhetorical ploys never occur to the dry conscience that produces them. Yet it is to Marcel’s credit that he reveres his father (Max) and aspires one day to make movies like Madame de . . . and Lola Montés. Father and son do not seem close as artists, but they both know how headstrong people can be and they both present the implacable touchstones of time, death, and the records. Marcel is the more honorable documentarist because of his commitment to observe impartially but with sympathy; he is not that far from the master of ceremonies’s helpless amusement in La Ronde.
Still, Marcel’s own comedies—Peaux de Bananes and Feu à Volonté—do not challenge the supremacy of his father’s art. The son’s wish to be lighter may only be the conscientious guarding against gravity. He says that his inquiries into some of the wounds of modern history were merely assignments. It is ingenuous when the pictures make such demands on audiences ami have brought so many problems to their maker. Let Marcel follow his own path and admit a sense of duty; there are ample subjects along the way deserving his attention.
Married Regine Ackermann, August 21, 1956. Children: Catherine Julie, Danielle, Jeanne Dorothee.