Marcel Ophüls: The Interrogating Eye
A master of the grand-scale documentary, Marcel Ophüls has crafted a compelling body of work that questions the nature of truth, history, and testimony. The German-born Ophüls came as a youth to Hollywood when his father, famed director Max Ophüls, was forced to leave Germany and, eventually, France. Receiving an education at Hollywood High and later at Berkeley, Ophüls returned to France and began his filmmaking career as an assistant to such directors as John Huston, Julien Duvivier, and Anatole Litvak. After producing some unremarkable fiction works and working for French and German television, Ophüls turned his attention to the production of his acclaimed indictment of French collaboration with the Nazis, The Sorrow and The Pity. Since that time, he has continued to employ the documentary form not simply to record events but to interrogate the core of some of history’s most problematic social and political issues.