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Marcel Ophuls
Birth at
1 November 1927
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Director. Born Marcel Oppenheimer. The only son of director Max Ophüls and actress Hilde Wall, he moved to Paris with his parents when Hitler came to power in 1933 and became a French citizen in 1938. During his father’s stay in America in the 1940s, he attended Hollywood High School. In 1946 he served in the theater division of the U.S. occupation forces in Japan. After demobilization, he studied at Eastern College then at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1950, he accepted American citizenship
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Director. Born Marcel Oppenheimer. The only son of director Max Ophüls and actress Hilde Wall, he moved to Paris with his parents when Hitler came to power in 1933 and became a French citizen in 1938. During his father’s stay in America in the 1940s, he attended Hollywood High School. In 1946 he served in the theater division of the U.S. occupation forces in Japan. After demobilization, he studied at Eastern College then at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1950, he accepted American citizenship and returned to France with his family. They took into account philosophy at the Sorbonne and began their film career as an assistant to Julien Duvivier Anatole Litvac and his own father. He made a short film about the life and work of Matisse in 1960 and, thanks to his friendship with François Truffaut, directed the episode "Love at Twenty" in 1962. In his first directorial project, the solo revealed himself as an entertaining commercial life-affirming film, Banana Peel, in 1964, but the failure of the next action movie with Eddie Constantine caused a pause in his burgeoning career. After a period of unemployment, Ophüls found a job on French television filming short news reports and a three-and-a-half-hour documentary about Munich. This led to an ambitious venture that occupied Ophulsa for three years. With German and Swiss support, he directed Le Chagrin e la Pitie/The Sorrow and the Pity, a candid study of French behavior during the Nazi occupation. French television refused to show the film, but it was shown in cinemas across France with huge success. The film caused a lot of controversy and opened in Ofüls a brilliant documentary filmmaker and interviewer with a remarkable ability to talk about complex intellectual topics during long films so that the audience did not experience a momentary boredom. He also managed to insert personal remarks into his films without compromising their objectivity.