Editing Marcel Ophuls (section)

===Documentary filmmaker===
With underwhelming box-office fortunes, Ophuls turned to making television news documentaries.<ref name = "2004 Interview">
{{Cite news
 | last1        = Jefferies
 | first1       = Stuart 
 | title        = 'Patriotism is a lie'
 | work         = The Guardian
 | location     = London
 | publisher    = Guardian Media Group
 | issn         = 1756-3224
 | date         = 24 May 2004
 | url          = https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/may/24/1
 | access-date  = 27 May 2025
 | archive-url  = https://web.archive.org/web/20140913204310/https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/may/24/1
 | archive-date = 13 September 2014 | url-status   = live
}}</ref> Although he enjoyed making entertainment films, Ophuls became identified as a documentarian, using a characteristically sober interview style to resolve disparate experiences into a persuasive argument.<ref name = "2004 Interview"/> He did not have an inferiority complex towards his father, because he viewed Max as a genius, and himself to be actually an inferior fiction film director.<ref name = "2004 Interview"/> French TV commissioned a documentary on the [[Munich Agreement|Munich crisis of 1938]]: ''Munich'' (1967).<ref name="Guardian Obit" />

He then was commissioned to make a film that examined [[France]] under [[Nazi occupation]], ''[[The Sorrow and the Pity]]'' (1969). The four-and-a-half-hour film  portrays "French citizens who are revealed as having been all too eager to collaborate with the occupiers."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Hedges |first=Inez |title=Staging History from the Shoah to Palestine: Three Plays and Essays on WWII and Its Aftermath |date=2021 |publisher=[[Springer International Publishing AG]] |isbn=978-3-030-84008-2 |location=London |page=81}}</ref> The film exposed France’s self-excusing myths and saw something nastier, shabbier, more political and more human.<ref name = "Review TSATP 2025">
{{Cite news
 | last1        = Bradshaw
 | first1       = Peter 
 | title        = Marcel Ophuls was the unflinching chronicler of France’s suppressed wartime shame
 | work         = The Guardian
 | location     = London
 | publisher    = Guardian Media Group
 | issn         = 1756-3224
 | date         = 26 May 2025
 | url          = https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/may/26/marcel-ophuls-france-suppressed-wartime-shame-sorrow-pity
 | access-date  = 27 May 2025
 | archive-url  = https://web.archive.org/web/20250526154505/https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/may/26/marcel-ophuls-france-suppressed-wartime-shame-sorrow-pity
 | archive-date = 26 May 2025
 | url-status   = live
}}</ref> American film critic [[Pauline Kael]] described the film's impact this way: "There are fragments that in context gain a new meaning: the viciousness of shaving the heads of the women who had slept with Germans is horrible enough without the added recognition that probably those who did the shaving had spiritually slept with the Germans themselves."<ref name = "Kael Review 1972">
{{Cite news
 | last1        = Kael
 | first1       = Pauline
 | author-link  = Pauline Kael 
 | title        = Collaboration and Resistance
 | work         = [[The New Yorker]]
 | location     = New York
 | publisher    = F-R Publishing Company
 | issn         = 0028-792X
 | date         = 25 March 1972
 | url          = https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/sorrow-and-pity-pauline-kael/
 | access-date  = 27 May 2025
 | via          = ''Scraps from the Loft''
 | archive-url  = https://web.archive.org/web/20211009225906/https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/sorrow-and-pity-pauline-kael/
 | archive-date = 9 October 2021
 | url-status   = live
}}</ref> Although the film was commissioned by French TV, it caused so much outrage in France, that it was not broadcast until 1981.<ref name = "Review TSATP 2025"/>