Metaphorically Sleeping with the Enemy

Film: Le Chagrin et la Pitie (The Sorrow and the Pity)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

I alluded to this when I watched Hotel Terminus: Marcel Ophuls has a one-track mind. As a Jewish survivor of World War II, Ophuls naturally has a deep and abiding hatred for the Nazis. However, his true wrath is reserved for those who assisted them without being members of the party. In Hotel Terminus he explored those who assisted Nazis fleeing from Germany after the war. In Le Chagrin et la Pitie (The Sorrow and the Pity), his ire and frustration are reserved for those French citizens who collaborated with their conquerors.

To make his point, Ophuls mixes interviews with resistance fighters, former German soldiers, and in particular a French soldier who fought on the Eastern front in a German uniform and a great deal of archival footage from the war. The points and comments made through the interviews are thus enhanced by these flashes back into the past.

Ophuls’s goal, evidently, is not simply to expose the collaborators for what they were, nor is it to allow them to justify their actions. What Ophuls really wants is to discover the reason that a French person would decide to assist those who had invaded his or her country and further the ends of a military that has proven itself to be hostile. Why, he wants to know, would any Frenchman don a German uniform and fight for the enemy of France? Could such an action be justified? Could there be a legitimate reason for abandoning France in this way?

The answers are both interesting and disturbing, and like the Nazis themselves, speak to the baser, uglier side of human nature. Most of the reasons cited are anti-Semitism, xenophobia, fear, a desire to survive, an assumption that German occupation was inevitable and could not be fought, and anti-communism. A few of these reasons—namely fear and a desire to survive—are treated with a bit more understanding than the others, and truly these are reasons that are a bit easier to understand.

It seems that in this film, unlike Hotel Terminus, the goal of Ophuls is less to point the finger and accuse and more to gain understanding of the how and why collaboration could have and did happen. The idea is less to condemn (although Ophuls appears to be unable to breathe without finding someone to blame) and more to understand the why. Ophuls allows people, particularly the collaborators, the opportunity to justify their actions during the war, and thus in many ways to blame and accuse themselves.

Undoubtedly, a vast amount of footage was created to construct this documentary, since it appears in two distinct parts, each lasting longer than two hours. Additional proof is that Ophuls shot the bulk of his interview footage in 1969 and the film was not released until 1971, indicating a long and involved editing process. What I honestly wonder as a viewer was if Ophuls couldn’t have made his legitimate points in something a bit shorter. Was it necessary to have more than four hours of interview and archival footage to explain the actions of the collaborators? Ultimately, the actions come down to those who wanted to guarantee their own survival and those who were more worried about Bolsheviks and Jews than they were about an oppressive regime from over the border. The tendency is to look at the first group as cowardly and the second group as something approaching inhuman. The first can be understood, if derided. The second does seem to warrant a bug-under-a-microscope sort of scrutiny. But even this sort of study isn’t that difficult in the conclusion: it all boils down to fear. Some people fear for their lives; other people fear anything different. Close curtain. In fact, in the first section, one of the interview subjects says flat out that anti-Semitism became a point of agreement between many Frenchmen and Germans.

Ophuls spends a good deal of time discussing the film Jud Suss (as near as I can figure, the translation is Suss the Jew) and many other German propaganda films of the day. These films naturally support the idea of the Reich and also tend to make further villains of the Jews. It’s an interesting film based on the clips, simply because it really looks like the Jew is the most sympathetic character in the film. We’re told that most of the French stayed away from the propaganda films, but those who saw their own biases reinforced tended to go to this and other movies from Germany. A part of the attraction was that while the films were German, many of the actors were French.

Le Chagrin et la Pitie is an interesting film, but it feels too long by a half. Ophuls certainly has a point, but in the end, he’s not beating a dead horse, but jumping up and down on a damp patch where a dead horse used to be.

Why to watch Le Chagrin et la Pitie: Some history shouldn’t be forgotten.
Why not to watch: While Ophuls is right, does he need another four hours to prove it?

Dreamhouse Sold Separately

Film: Hotel Terminus: Klaus Barbie sa Vie et Son Temps (Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie)
Format: DVDs from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Marcel Ophuls is an angry man. He can be forgiven for this, considering the fact that his life was thrown into terrible upheaval during World War II thanks to the Nazis. It’s not the Nazis who receive the bulk of his ire and scorn, however. It certainly appears that way on a first view, but this is not what drives Ophuls to make films. In Ophuls’s world, the Nazis represent the second lowest level of Hell. The true lowest level is reserved for those who collaborated with the Nazis, especially in France.


Hotel Terminus: Klaus Barbie sa Vie et Son Temps (Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, hereafter referred to as simply Hotel Terminus) is a nearly 270-minute documentary that, based on the title, is about the man who headed the Gestapo in Lyon during the war and was responsible for the deporting of thousands of French Jews and undesirables to concentration camps and near-certain death. Certainly, a great deal of this film is about Barbie, his time in Lyon, his flight to South America, and his eventual extradition from Bolivia and trial back in France.

In essence, Ophuls is using the story of Barbie to get at a much larger problem, one that was essentially covered up for a good forty years between the flight of Barbie to South America and his extradition 40 years later. What Ophuls uncovers is not just the how of Barbie’s escape, but the who. Through a variety of interviews, Ophuls makes a genuine connection between Barbie’s escape from justice and a variety of governments and government agencies—including American ones—who aided and abetted him because of his usefulness.

Complicity with various Nazi war criminals was something of an open secret. The American space race was aided in no small part by Werner von Braun, who also invented the V-2 rockets that were sent to pulverize London near the end of the war. But there is a feeling that complicity with Klaus Barbie is somehow different. We pin medals on the uniforms of bomber pilots, after all, while based on a great deal of testimony in this film, Barbie was a man who enjoyed torturing people for the sake of torturing them. The nickname “The Butcher of Lyon” doesn’t happen by accident.

Hotel Terminus is slow to develop, which makes sense in a film of this length. Ophuls breaks the film down into discreet sections: Barbie’s time in Lyon, his flight to South America, his time in Bolivia, his connections, etc. In each part of the film, Barbie becomes less the focus of the narrative and more the example of a larger pattern of behavior by various governments to protect men who deserved a far worse fate because of information they possessed or knowledge they had. One long section of the film deals with Barbie’s alias. It was again an open secret that he was who he was, but because of his knowledge and position of influence with various governments in South America, no one could touch him. He was, in essence, a man too valuable to get rid of.

And this is what fuels the anger of Marcel Ophuls. Throughout the film, in various interviews with those who knew Klaus Barbie and helped him, Ophuls goes on the offensive, seeking to determine not what people did, but why they would consent to help a man with such a bloody and terrible reputation and past. By the end of the film, with Barbie’s sentencing almost meaningless, the answer has still not arrived.

What comes through again and again, even more than the complicity of various people and organizations with Barbie’s crimes is the complete lack of acknowledgment that there is any value in pursuing justice against the man. By the time his life sentence in France was carried out, he had become an old man recovering from a stroke and doomed to die in a few years. “So what?” is the repeated essence of many of these conversations. The past is the past, and it helps no one to put a decrepit man behind bars for crimes that happened a generation and a half ago.

Or does it? Ophuls wants justice, and I think most people who watch the film will want more justice that was given here. A few years in a cell at the end of his life is a small payment for the massive evil that the man worked and the thousands of lives he either ended or destroyed.

Essentially, Hotel Terminus is Marcel Ophuls’s way of reminding us that for some crimes, perhaps there is no true justice, but that striving for that justice is always worthwhile and important. Unless we remember what has happened and do what we can to make those responsible pay for their crimes, the past is doomed to be repeated again and again—and some pasts are too horrible to contemplate returning.

This is a hard watch. I will not call the film boring, but I will say that it does require a great deal of endurance. The 267 minute running time is almost exclusively interviews of people who knew or had dealings with Klaus Barbie, and while many of these interviews are enlightening and interesting, more than four hours of them straight through can cause some mental wandering. I recommend watching this over a period of several days, but I do recommend watching it.

Why to watch Hotel Terminus: Klaus Barbie et Son Temps: An important topic handled in extensive detail.
Why not to watch: Guy talking, guy talking, woman talking, guy talking.