The best Marcel Ophüls’s movies
If you love cinema, you will share this ranking of the best Marcel Ophüls’s movies, although you may have ordered them differently. In any case, we hope you love it and with a little luck discovering a movie that you still don’t know about Marcel Ophüls.
The Sorrow and the Pity
8.2/10
From 1940 to 1944, France's Vichy government collaborated with Nazi Germany. Marcel Ophüls mixes archival footage with 1969 interviews of a German officer and of collaborators and resistance fighters from Clermont-Ferrand. They comment on the nature, details and reasons for the collaboration, from anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and fear of Bolsheviks, to simple caution. Part one, "The Collapse," includes an extended interview with Pierre Mendès-France, jailed for anti-Vichy action and later France's Prime Minister. At the heart of part two, "The Choice," is an interview with Christian de la Mazière, one of 7,000 French youth to fight on the eastern front wearing German uniforms.
Egon Schiele: Excess and Punishment
6/10
In 1912, in Austria, the painter Egon Schiele is sent to jail accused of pornography with the nymphet Tatjana in his erotic paints. His mate, the model Vally, gets help from a famous lawyer to release him. Then he leaves Vally, marries with another woman and goes to the war.
Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie
7.6/10
Winner of a Best Documentary Academy Award, Marcel Ophuls' riveting film details the heinous legacy of the Gestapo head dubbed "The Butcher of Lyon." Responsible for over 4,000 deaths in occupied France during World War II, Barbie would escape--with U.S. help--to South America in 1951, where he lived until a global manhunt led to his 1983 arrest and subsequent trial.
François Truffaut: Stolen Portraits
7.6/10
Documentary overview of the life of French filmmaker François Truffaut.
Max par Marcel: Lola Montès
6.6/10
In a series of four documentaries, Marcel Ophuls pays tribute to his father Max, and in this last one discusses his role as an assistant director on "Lola Montès".
Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah
6.8/10
The process of making Shoah.
Max Ophuls ou Le plaisir de tourner
7.2/10
A 1965 episode of the French television program Cinéastes de notre temps, featuring interviews with many of film director Max Ophuls’s collaborators
Marcel Ophuls et Jean-Luc Godard, La rencontre de St-Gervais
7.8/10
In 2009, in a small theater in Geneva, Switzerland, the film directors Marcel Ophuls and Jean-Luc Godard met for an unusual, surprisngly intimate and sometimes contentious dialogue with each other in front of a live audience. Luckily for us, it was filmed.
