IN A WAY , THIS WORK, IT'S A CURSE'
us, Claudia Dreif
VIEWS REVIEWS 'IN A WAY THIS WORK, ITS A CURSE' An interview with Marcel Ophuls BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS Last November, the French Socialist government of President Francois Mitterrand lifted the...
...With the censorship and blacklisting that followed, I had to waste a great deal of my life—moving from one country to another as I found places to work...
...He probably doesn't like the film because he doesn't like [former French Premier Pierre] Mendes-France very much...
...I'd much rather be making fictional films...
...Which is very funny—and very apt...
...CD: And Mendes-France, as I recall, is sort of your documentary "star" in The Sorrow and the Pity...
...No, that's not the feeling...
...I've always believed that people were willing to sit through four and a half hours of talking heads because you had taken real-life people and told us their true stories in a fictional way...
...Running off with the circus, which is what movie making is, was being a drop-out...
...The reason his daughter's wedding is in the film was because we could only shoot on a certain day and he said, "Well, on Tuesday I can't do it because I'm marrying off my daughter...
...OPHULS: The Germans—with the complicity of the British...
...After that was done the same people came to me and said, "Well, how about now doing a movie about the war years...
...Can we talk a bit about what had to have been a fascinating childhood...
...How did you find them...
...It's a film with good guys and bad guys...
...In one night, twenty million French viewers watched a film that a succession of Gaullist governments had insisted was too controversial to be televised...
...Obviously, this could create problems...
...He had just become a French citizen and he didn't think it right to leave...
...So I asked, "Can we come to the wedding...
...Having him talk about the war during his daughter's wedding— surely that was a set-up...
...I don't think documentary filmmakers should stage things...
...Ironically, The Sorrow and the Pity, a four-and-a-half-hour chronicle of life under the Nazis in the city of Clermont-Ferrand, was originally made for French television in the late 1960s...
...Since The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls has made documentaries on topics ranging from the Nuremberg Trials to the civil war in Northern Ireland...
...schoolteachers who did nothing when their students disappeared...
...CD: What do you think about The Sorrow and the Pity being a joke in Annie Hall...
...OPHULS: Oh, yes...
...People are either interesting or not...
...When •war came to France in 1939, he decided to stay—even though he had a contract with David O. Selznick in Hollywood...
...Reactions to the film have never been a clear-cut party-based thing, anyway...
...It was stupid as far as my personal life went because it messed it up...
...But one of the things I'm most proud of is being a show-business man and a "pro...
...The filmmaker is always caught at the end, in the time of the final cut...
...If this disappoints you, Claudia, I'm sorry...
...What was it like to be the son of one of the great film directors of all time...
...OPHULS: Of course...
...It deadens human nature...
...The film was a co-production between German television and the BBC—and, as things went on, I had to take out injunctions against German television so that they wouldn't tamper with the film...
...They are going to look at the film and say, "Well, yes, we gave you permission to go interview Koestler, but we didn't think Koestler would say such horrible things— so we don't want that in the film...
...It's a marvelous answer...
...The Sorrow and the Pity is not an objective or a compassionate film...
...Veteran reporter David Schoenbrun, in his recent book on the French Resistance, echoed the oft-heard complaint that you showed the French more as collaborators than resisters...
...OPHULS: What I really think is that documentaries are a prison...
...Los Angeles in the 1940s was strange and dusty...
...CD: In The Memory of Justice, you interview your German wife and she says that she wishes you wouldn't make so many movies about serious subjects—a few light comedies would be nice...
...You do have to set up a camera and there does have to be a wedding—you don't just open a door and find a wedding there...
...De-Gaulle's Prime Minister, Chaban-Delmas, loved the film—but this was because he was a real Resistance leader...
...You know what the nicest thing about it is, Claudia...
...It's never a terrible trip for me...
...Heroism is something very special...
...That happened on his last film...
...If I ever get to do this movie, David Schoen-brun is the kind of journalist I'd like to take pot shots at...
...I have to read all these books...
...Not because of the traumatic part of the material—dealing with holocausts and other unpleasant subjects...
...The people who started resisting in the early days were, obviously, a very special kind of people...
...It was, in fact, the original birthplace of high school seediness...
...But there were no other candidates...
...And it's very nice...
...It's also very egotistical...
...VIEWS REVIEWS 'IN A WAY THIS WORK, ITS A CURSE' An interview with Marcel Ophuls BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS Last November, the French Socialist government of President Francois Mitterrand lifted the twelve-year ban on the television showing of Marcel Ophuls's classic documentary of France during the Occupation, The Sorrow and the Pity...
...And if with this compassionate thing, you mean I have sympathy for the Fascist characters in The Sorrow and the Pity, this is certainly not true...
...I was twelve...
...Ophuls showed Frenchmen who had joined the Waff en SS...
...Two Director-Generals committed themselves to showing it—and then subsequently didn't...
...The core of my energy was wasted because I wasn't in the place where I should have been...
...Do you know if The Godfather is for or against the Mafia...
...If you're lucky enough to survive these things, there are many more things you can do with your life than just concentrate on that...
...Very much at ease in life...
...I found that a rather odd statement...
...At CBS, where I worked once and where they have some very witty people, he was known as a "lunching journalist...
...In 1951,1 returned to Europe and Paris...
...The good guys are rather rare—unfortunately...
...When I make these films, for instance, I have to go through hours and hours of concentration camp footage...
...The number of people who are ready to be heroes in any situation is quite small...
...OPHULS: You know, movies are an illusion...
...CD: Who made the cuts...
...If you get any fifty people and get them talking about what they did or did not do during that period, they will come to life in a very interesting way...
...OPHULS: You know, one of the film projects I'd like to do most is a documentary made from Philip Knightly's book about war correspondents, The First Casualty...
...Not just to his son...
...Allen plays movie buff Alvie Singer, and The Sorrow and the Pity, of course, is Singer's favorite film...
...He was the only one I actually met face to face before the interview...
...Even it in ordinary life these people are rather boring and dull...
...And the shopkeeper who had the name Klein and who put up an advertisement to say that he was not a Jew is obviously not a good guy...
...I believe in music...
...And that's how I got into it...
...Very conscious of his surroundings...
...And it was in Paris, on a cold, wet winter afternoon, that interviewer Claudia Dreifus caught up with him...
...CD: I'm wondering whether the Mitterrand government had some political motives behind the lifting of the ban...
...Tm not compassionate...
...And a lot of things that people see in movies and think are part of the character of the movie-maker are also an illusion...
...But you mustn't give me credit for making people interesting...
...So I said, "We could send you a print of the rushes of the interview and then you could have a souvenir of the wedding...
...In 1971, The Sorrow and the Pity was released commercially and quickly became an international art-house classic...
...It is quite natural that people would have other priorities—especially when victory seemed quite obviously to be going to the other side...
...It is a very partisan film...
...We followed them and loved and hated them in the same way we cared for heroes and villains in fictional movies...
...Very free...
...It's trying to be something for everyone...
...Your interviewees became "characters...
...He was a German Jew who, the day after the Reichstag fire, fled Germany for France...
...In the case of The Sorrow and the Pity, people were talking about the most important period in their lives...
...On the bed, when they get home from seeing the movie, Woody Allen says, "Boy, those Frenchmen were really brave having to listen to Maurice Chevalier all day...
...The Sorrow and the Pity does not deny heroism...
...It deadens truth...
...The fact that the films are what they are has something to do with that...
...But the people he went to see and the kind of level he worked at were bound to bring in a kind of official optimism about human nature, about the way things work, about heroes...
...What happened was that I was working in French television and someone said, "Would you like to do a documentary about Munich...
...I want to have the Russian generals in there, but I want Koestler too...
...Because he had the power to keep the gag in...
...In those situations, very few people have a disposition to take that kind of risk—or even the possibility...
...His book on the Resistance is interesting...
...Heroism is something very special...
...But, at the same time, my mother was his refuge...
...There was a terrific triangle between my mother, my father, and me...
...I doubt it very much...
...It was bleak...
...My father had a very active sex life outside the marriage...
...But also because I'm my father's son and I love the tinsel of show business...
...I very much believe in that...
...But the interesting thing about that is that Woody Allen must have, at some point, had some sort of confrontation with a producer somewhere, a phoner, who said, "Woody, do you want to see the box-office on The Sorrow and the Pity...
...I did not get into this because I was the son of Max Ophuls and Jewish and a war refugee...
...What happened was a series of events that led to that scene...
...One of the reasons that The Sorrow and the Pity and some of my other films do come off is because I rebel against the condition of documentary filmmaking...
...The banning of the film, fortunately, did not kill it...
...Who do people want to appropriate it at a national-historical-official level...
...You showed him telling his war experiences during his daughter's wedding feast...
...I have very little sympathy for him...
...And this is where I'd love to be Woody Allen...
...I have a theory about the success of The Sorrow and the Pity...
...What kind of shit is that...
...You don't...
...He seemed very affluent, very content—the cliched ex-Nazi who had made out fine in the New Germany...
...Is that true of you too, Marcel Ophuls...
...Enough said...
...They are political rivals...
...CD: One of the great strengths of The Sorrow and the Pity, the thing that reviewers say makes it a classic, is the great compassion you seem to show for the people you interview—people on all sides of the conflict...
...This German officer was on a list of people who had been to Clermont-Ferrand during the Occupation...
...Actually, I don't take all that much interest in people's private lives unless I have a camera and am paid to do it...
...That's what I was telling you about the BBC...
...I'm aware of its bleakness, its grayness, its artistic limits...
...The reason they probably have some objective qualities is because they were assignments— not obsessions...
...They are all allies when it comes down to it...
...That would be true in any situation...
...I have very much the same reaction that Orson Welles had when he was once asked why he portrayed Fascists on the screen...
...Why do people want to appropriate it at a national-historical-official level...
...I'm supposed to fly to East Berlin soon to confer with some apparatchiks because the East Germans want to co-produce...
...Concentration camps waited in the background...
...In a way, this work, it's a curse because there are so many more things in life than holocausts and wars and collective crimes...
...But the chicken and the egg, which came first...
...I hated it...
...He said, "To give the enemy the maximum of prestige...
...I don't know whether Mitterrand likes the film...
...But once France lost the war, we got out through affidavits from Einstein and with some stolen visas to the United States...
...I've always heard I was there at the same time as Norma Jean Baker [Marilyn Monroe], but when I scan the high school yearbook, I never find her...
...He was extremely resentful that she mothered me...
...He was smoking a big, fat cigar and he had a big gold tooth and he looked good for what I thought we were portraying in the film...
...OPHULS: Well, she wasn't just speaking for herself there—but for both of us...
...He said, "Well, I don't know...
...It was a stupid decision to maintain for twelve years...
...OPHULS: Well, of course, it wasn't a total accident...
...It deadens truth' Frankly, I don't think that people should be constantly confronted, with life being as brief as it is, with high seriousness...
...Also, he saw The Sorrow and the Pity and he was happy with it...
...Even before the change in government, every time there was a new Director-General of French television, he would always be asked at his first press conference, "When are you going to show that movie...
...That didn't prevent us from being great friends...
...CD: The Sorrow and the Pity has gotten criticism from some surprising quarters...
...OPHULS: Yes...
...OPHULS: Quite...
...We didn't cast around for them...
...I would tell him mine...
...Pompidou detested it...
...CD: Earlier you said that anyone who had lived through the years around World War II was completely marked by it...
...When I was living on my own in Paris, we would meet once a week and walk around till three in the morning...
...OPHULS: Elation...
...CD: Well, let's talk about that...
...France was the place where I wanted to work and make films...
...It only deadens history...
...It only deadens history...
...These days, with new political and cultural breezes blowing through French life, he is back in favor in Paris and is preparing a series of documentaries for French television...
...It's full of facts...
...It's more a feeling of punctuation and turning the page...
...But they are quite obviously the good guys...
...What I'm saying is that private producers, French television, East German television—they are always ready to come together and finance a film on the assumption, usually not too far-fetched, that at cutting time the poor fucking director is going to sit in the screening room and take whatever shit comes along...
...OPHULS: It's not a joke...
...But no one will finance me one...
...I get paid to be compassionate...
...That film, which was about the Nuremberg trials, was much less of a critical success than the first one...
...The jokes that Woody Allen and Diane Keaton make afterwards are a riot...
...Aside from being a filmmaker, he was a political man...
...On the other hand, a lot of my life was lived in this rather seedy place called Hollywood High School, which I think pioneered drug addicts and drop-outs and general high school seedi-ness...
...But it does make the very obvious point that heroism is bound to be rare in any crisis situation where not only your life but the lives of your families are threatened...
...There's a whole category of very famous journalists who tend to gravitate to the official view because that is their lifestyle...
...I was five years old when we left Germany...
...How are you going to co-produce something on the Spanish Civil War without mentioning Homage to Catalonia and George Orwell and Arthur Koestler...
...That kind of hypocrisy...
...So what are they going to do...
...You are compassionate enough to let them be themselves and thus to let them reveal themselves to the camera...
...The nicest thing is that the producer sold it for three times the price because the three French television channels went into weeks of bidding against each other...
...They had been stupid about not putting it on in the first place...
...He didn't consult me on artistic things, but he consulted me on contracts because I have a lawyer's talent for contracts...
...To some extent, to be a hero in such a situation takes some Don Quixoticism...
...Right now, the French are proposing that I do something on the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War...
...Sr there's now the money and that's fine...
...My father was out of work for four years...
...I'm not a rich man...
...CD: Earlier, you said you were your father's son...
...We wrote all the people and everyone else, for one reason or another, was unavailable for an interview—except this man...
...Ophuls lives in Paris with his German-born wife, Regine...
...I mean, who am I supposed to interview...
...So it's not a moral victory...
...Are you tired of being the world's number one documentary filmmaker...
...OPHULS: I think, Claudia, we're now getting to the core of things...
...I think The Sorrow and the Pity and the film I made before it about Munich and The Memory of Justice are really a trilogy...
...Even ideologically...
...Whenever he would find out that I was trying to get a job as an assistant with a Parisian director, he would tell the director, "Forget about him...
...By the time the victory came, it was too late...
...I like the tone of the great Hollywood musicals—and I would rather be doing that kind of thing...
...Do you know whether Apocalypse Now is for or against the war in Vietnam...
...CD: I've heard that your father tried to discourage you from becoming a filmmaker...
...CD: Would you say that there was some Freudian rivalry in the way he tried to thwart you...
...I think we had reached the point where no matter what the outcome of the election, The Sorrow and the Pity would have been shown...
...OPHULS: I don't think they had any designs of that kind—except that the movie had become a myth and a legend of Gaul-list censorship...
...CD: Let's talk about the film you made after The Sorrow and the Pity, The Memory of Justice...
...OPHULS: A great many things happened to that film...
...He would tell me stories...
...I was an only child...
...But to everyone who knew him...
...CD: What about that former German officer who had participated in the occupation of Clermont-Ferrand...
...a shopkeeper who, in 1940, had taken out an advertisement telling the town he was not Jewish...
...The two farmers who were in the Resistance .. . well, they were the first two farmers we found...
...Therefore, the Nazi years, and all the consequences they could have had on a childhood, on our family life, were perhaps not as traumatic for me as they were for many other people...
...It was 1933...
...Those are two examples of a kind of compassion that I think is entrepreneurial and fake...
...People who work in offices and use telephones, they are all allies in the end...
...Very free...
...CD: Now that The Sorrow and the Pity has finally been shown on French television, you must feel elated...
...Once, a woman at PBS wanted to make a film on me that she wanted to call The Compassionate Eye...
...French television, however, is state-run, and many conservative French politicians were irked by a movie that so rudely disputed national myths about heroism and resistance during World War II...
...Perhaps Francois Mitterrand wants to remind his people what some right-wing Frenchmen are capable of...
...It's not because they are French...
...To me, in many ways, The Sorrow and the Pity is an old movie...
...I mean, this conversation must have taken place at some time...
...It doesn't make any difference what country you come from...
...The BBC, interestingly enough, became an accomplice to the butchering of the film...
...The German occupation in France is the most important, most crucial, most humiliating, most compromising, most satanic period in contempprary French history...
...Being a pro means doing things that are hard for you—and in life, I'm rather shy, not friendly, and certainly not compassionate...
...How is anyone going to get a joke made about a film seen by a half-million Frenchmen at some Left Bank art house...
...I'm not compassionate...
...The first will concern the Battle of Yorktown in the American Revolutionary War...
...Today, Marcel Ophuls, son of the late French-German film director, Max Ophuls (La Ronde, Lola Montes), is known as the world's foremost documentary film director...
...OPHULS: Well, thank you...
...Since Mitterrand's surprise Socialist victory, there's been a resurgence of Neo-Fascist activities in France...
...He's one of your "good guys...
...My father was a relaxed international filmmaker— Don Juan...
...I don't take all that much interest in people's private lives unless have a camera and am paid to do it' OPHULS: By happenstance...
...CD: Was it difficult to be a twelve-year-old European boy living in wartime Hollywood...
...I know it already...
...The Germans or the British...
...CD: Okay—so let's talk about some of your Sorrow and the Pity people...
...The Sorrow and the Pity even turns up in Woody Allen's Annie Hall...
...Of course...
...The thing I learned from working on that film, above all other things, is that public television in all countries is dependent on the powers that be...
...We did that...
...But working for a government on a planned thing is like working for the managers of one of these great multinationals...
...What makes a difference is whether you're a phoner or a filmmaker...
...And torture...
...My father was, by that time, making movies in Europe again...
...CD: As you talk, I hear a certain boredom from you about your profession...
...When you read David Halberstam's The Powers That Be, there are pages on David Schoenbrun's entertaining the Paleys and various celebrities—and this is his approach to the French Resistance...
...Documentary filmmaking, yes, it's a prison, but I don't think that has to be inevitable...
...Because I am aware of it, I probably make more attempts to entertain than others might...
...But I happen to have 20 per cent of the film and the fact that it sold for three times the sum it would have sold for before is very satisfying...
...This was the show business capital of the world and my father knew all kinds of important show business people and there was all this big prestige...
...A bunch of Russian generals...
...It was a good portrayal of what he wanted to convey to people...
...Your movie is going to be seen by at least ten million people...
...I love the fantasy of fictional films, the luxury...
...I hate it...
...In America, that would be true in the same way...
...It's stupid...
...Politics got involved...
...My father was very Prussian and he was very suspicious of drop-outs...
...OPHULS: Well, my father was a fascinating man...
...There are bumpers in between that any filmmaker has to accommodate and fight for...
...Even though you protest against it, making movies about the war seems to be your life's work...
...Actually, I hate relativity in moviemaking...
...We were very close...
...It's what the French call homage...
Vol. 46 • May 1982 • No. 5
