Marcel Ophuls missed his plane.
So he may be a bit jet-lagged tonight at the kick-off of his career retrospective at the Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal.
That’s if he makes it at all.
The 86-year-old French filmmaker – son of the great Max Ophuls and maker of the Oscar-winning Holocaust doc Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie – got into town at 1 p.m.
He should have arrived a day earlier, but missed his scheduled flight from Paris after getting the times mixed up. He thought the Montreal arrival time was his Paris departure time.
Oh, well. At least he’s here.
To anyone interested in the moral ambiquities of war, and has the patience to watch movies that can go for four hours or more, Ophuls is your man.
The American Revolution, the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Bosnian war, the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland – all have been scoped by Ophuls’ acerbic eye.
He’s taken on the breakup of communist East Germany, as well, and looked back at his family’s life as Jewish emigrés from Nazi Germany, and debated ideas live on stage with Jean-Luc Godard.
The retrospective at the Cinemathèque québécoise begins tonight with Ophuls’ little-seen 1967 debut, Munich or Peace in Our Time, a look at the Munich Crisis of 1938 that he made for French TV.
Friday night at 6:30, he’ll introduce The Sorrow and the Pity, the 1969 follow-up that catapulted him to fame as the first to hold a mirror up to French society for collaborating with the Nazis.
Saturday, he goes into autobiographical mode at 3 p.m. with America Revisited (1971), a personal favourite of his that looks at the Ophuls family’s years of exile in America from 1940 to 1949, followed at 7 by Un voyageur (2013).
That last one, a new summing up of his and his father’s careers, is called Ain’t Misbehavin’, in English. It’s the same shortened version (106 minutes vs 130) that got the director so steamed at his producers at Cannes and TIFF.
Sunday at 3 Ophuls will hold a free-of-charge discussion with John S. Friedman, his executive producer on Hôtel Terminus (it’ll be their first meeting since it was made, in 1988), followed at 6 by a screening of the four-and-a-half hour film.
And on it goes – 10 docs in all, plus the Godard talk and an hour-long interview from 2005 at Ophuls’ home in southwest France, all with requisite English or French subtitles – right through to next Saturday.
Total running time? 1,884 minutes – over 31 hours.
Try to stay awake. If he can, you can too.
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Update: Ophuls did show up for the screening of Munich – jet-lagged and quite a bit deaf, but remarkably spry and witty and as generous with his time as his audiences are when they watch his films. “I’m a little, in spite of myself, the inventor of long documentaries,” the director apologized at the outset of his 20-minute introduction, “but I believe it’s not my fault.” It’s the subjects he chooses, he explained, subjects like the disastrous Munich Agreement of 1938 that bought “peace in our time” but soon led to war, subjects that can’t be summed up in an hour or two. Munich clocked in at just under two, but it was an edit by French TV, not Ophuls’ longer German cut; even at that length it was a marvelously fresh and irreverent edit of archival footage and interviews with first-hand players of the time, from Edouard Daladier, Anthony Eden and Lady Asquith to Hitler’s interpreter, Paul Schmidt. “I am fascinated by power, yes, I am,” Ophuls confided. He took a few questions from the nearly full house at Salle Claude-Jutra, decried the incompetence of his cameraman on Munich (whose close-ups on Daladier were out-of-focus), commented (perhaps fancifully) that his next project will be a fiction film, then settled in at the back to watch the opening scenes of his debut (which he said he hasn’t seen in years), all the while commenting to his seat mate on what the characters were doing up on screen, ad lib and à haute voix. Fifteen minutes in, he gathered up his things and slipped out. À demain.
Second update: Apparently, Ophuls doesn’t take an umlaut over the u (ü), so I’ve taken it out. His father, born Oppenheimer, used Ophüls as a pseudonym but removed the umlaut when he left Germany and took up citizenship in France; tel père, tel fils. (Wikipedia has it wrong, as do several books and DVDs of Ophuls films and even imdb.com, the online movie bible.)
jheinrich@montrealgazette.com
