Marcel Ophuls, cinéaste et historien | Hôtel Terminus – Partie 1

Editorial

The documentary work of Marcel Ophuls (1927–2025) is as remarkable as it is rarely shown. Between France, Germany and the United States, Marcel, as a filmmaker, journalist and historian, developed a distinctive perspective on the history of the twentieth century, made and unfolding, through several films little known in France—apart from the spectacular censorship of The Sorrow and the Pity (1969)—up to the election of François Mitterrand, and the Oscar for Best Documentary awarded to Hôtel Terminus in 1988.

In this presidential election year, with its nauseating overtones, Katharina Bellan and Christelle Rabier invite you to discover a selection of films with a sharp eye on Europe’s violent history, from Clermont-Ferrand to Sarajevo.

The son of director Max Ophüls, Marcel Ophuls, born Oppenheimer, acquired French and then American citizenship during his father’s forced exile, first in Vienna and then in Paris, before the family left for Hollywood. Although he also worked in fiction (Peau de banane, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau, from a screenplay by Claude Sautet, 1963), the failure of his second fiction film led him first to join the Zoom editorial team at the television station, for which he made several reports, before trying his hand at a feature-length documentary about the Second World War. For The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls made original choices: a single location, centered on the city of Clermont-Ferrand, not far from Lyon and Vichy; interviews; archival research; long interviews on both sides of the Franco-German border; an editing style that gives prominence to archival footage and the faces of the people involved; and a clear political stance on the part of the director. This position, which ran counter to the official history of a France of resistance, even led Simone Veil to threaten to resign from the ORTF board of directors to prevent the organization from broadcasting a film that claimed that “all French people are bastards.” Although the film was censored on French television, it quickly became an international success, first in Paris cinemas, then in the United States.

Marcel Ophuls’s career then unfolded between France, Germany and the United States, with documentaries, sometimes commissioned, dealing with history, violence and cruelty, but also cinema and the gaze—or rather, the point of view. This series will be an opportunity to discover some rarely screened films that invite us, as historians or filmmakers, and as viewers, to take a position.

Hôtel Terminus – Klaus Barbie, His Life and His Times – Part 1

by Marcel Ophuls | 1988 | France, United States, Germany | 2h28 [subject to confirmation]

“Drawing on testimony from more than 80 people, gathered over two years in Bolivia, Germany, the United States and France, and numerous archival documents, Marcel Ophüls constructs a four-and-a-half-hour account of the former head of the Gestapo in Lyon (the Hôtel Terminus was the Gestapo’s headquarters in Lyon). Having become an informant for the American intelligence services in 1947, Klaus Barbie hid in Bolivia until 1983, when he was abducted and brought back to France thanks to the efforts of Serge Klarsfeld. This film sheds light on the Lyon trial and highlights the shortcomings of the investigation. This remarkable work, both cinematically and as a documentary, is an indispensable historical document on the second half of the 20th century.”

Catherine Blangonnet

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