Marcel Ophuls, the filmmaker of German origin whose powerful documentary “The Sorrow and the damage” exploded the myth of the generalized French resistance to the Nazi occupation during the Second World War, died this weekend in France. He was 97 years old.
His death was announced by his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert, who did not provide more details.
Mr. Ophuls had produced several minor feature films before wallowing glory in 1969 with “The Sorrow and the damage”, his four-hour documentary on Wartime Clermont-Ferrand, an industrial city located almost in the center of France. In a impartial and incisive style, he interviewed traders and farmers, bankers and entrepreneurs, teachers and lawyers who collaborated either with the Nazis and the Vichy diet or actively resisted the occupation – but who, in most cases, had closed eyes on the gusts of Jews and anti -Nazis.
When the film was presented for the first time in the cinemas of Paris, it was encountered by a shock, an outrage and tears. He suppressed the myth – favored by Charles de Gaulle on his return to France with the victorious Allied armies in 1944 – that a large majority of his compatriots were open or secret supporters of his resistance movement.
Originally produced for television, “The Sorrow and the damage” was prohibited from French waves until 1981. Conservative politicians denounced Mr. Ophuls, qualifying his work as a “prosecutor” who unjustly portrayed the French as a coward or worse. “He is not trying to continue the French,” insisted Mr. Ophuls A 2004 interview with The Guardian newspaper. “Who can say that their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?”
