Los Angeles: Legendary director Marcel Ophuls, best known for his project ‘The Sorrow and the Pity’, has passed away at the age of 97. His death was reported to the New York Times by his grandson, Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert, who provided no details concerning the circumstances of the death on Saturday, Variety reported.
Ophuls, the son of famed German and Hollywood film director Max Ophuls, often claimed that he was a prisoner of his success in the documentary field when what he really wanted was to make lighthearted musicals and romances. But his exhaustive “The Sorrow and the Pity,” about French complicity with their Nazi occupiers during WWII, elevated the film documentary in the public eye.
“Hotel Terminus” won him an Oscar for best documentary in 1988.
His 1991 docu “November Days” was a portrait of the weakening political leadership of East Germany, as per Variety.
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Ophuls “frequently wrote about film, lectured at universities and served on the board of the French Filmmakers Society.”
After receiving a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1991, Ophuls swore that he was going to return to feature filmmaking, but instead turned out “Veillees d’armes,” a film about the history of wartime journalists. That proved to be his last directing effort until 2012’s “Un Voyageur” (2012), a self-portrait in which he offered his remembrances and summed up his experience but which was released in the US under the absurd title “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”
He was married to Regine Ophuls, by whom he had three daughters.
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