A Sense of Paradox

The worst thing you can say about Marcel Ophuls is that whatever his politics, artistically he is a bourgeois humanist--mawkish, inconclusive, unclear, visually universalizing the particular. At the same time, his films show the power of that bourgeois humanism to move into an extra-political realm in which each person must ask himself how he would respond in the same situation of political and moral crisis.

This type of paradox made Ophuls's recent week-long visit to Cambridge exasperating indeed. He came riding a wave of enthusiasm and interest in his uniquely moving style of political documentary. (Certainly the people who ran his tour felt justified in overselling series tickets, then over-hyping the films, and finally scheduling them to be shown in places too small to accomodate the crowds they had drummed up.) His appearance was billed as a true combination of the political and the artistic.

His last four films (the only ones even he admits are worth talking about) are explicitly political in subject matter: the Nazification of Germany (Munich 1938); the mass demystification of America in the wake of Cambodia (America Revisited); a French town's response to German occupation (Sorrow and Pity); and the hellish political situation in Northern Ireland (A Sense of Loss). Many people came to see Ophuls looking for a new and bracing political message for our currently apathetic time. It seemed only logical that the man making films about such highly charged issues would have some kind of powerful political motive, hidden though it may be in his films.

Yet when asked last Saturday afternoon at a closed panel discussion which gained nothing by being closed, what his criteria were for inclusion of particular individuals and points of view, Ophuls replied, "First, narrative coherence, second emotional appeal, and third, and only third, political content." When asked next, "Why then do you make films about such highly political situations," Ophuls answered honestly, "Accident"--and you could hear the audience gasp.

For despite what many people have inferred from his films, Marcel Ophuls does not have a coherent philosophical analysis of political problems. Instead he focuses on the human side of political situations. Realizing this, we come to the roots of the Ophuls riddle. Looking at a critical example from his work will perhaps make things clearer.

Almost universally, people who see Sorrow and Pity come out with admiration and respect for Christian de la Masiere, a French aristocrat who fought in the Waffen SS for the Nazis on the Eastern front against Russia--in retrospect hardly the most justifiable position for a Frenchman during World War II. Ophuls himself said "I feel I have the right to judge Fascists" like la Masiere, and judge them severely. Yet we are unable to judge this man harshly--his principles, yes; his person, no. And this fact has confused many people who have tried hard to tease out the moral implications of Ophuls's films.

Explicitly, Ophuls says that la Masiere's conduct was reprehensible, yet Ophuls's power and desire to portray every man he deals with as a full human being forces us to recognize what la Masiers refused to recognize as a Nazi: the common humanity of men.

I must confess that I find the sympathetic portrayal of such a man politically confusing. While not wanting to make the argument that for a film to be good it must have my political stance, I think that by his subtly favorable presentation of la Masiere as a thoughtful, controlled, and supremely rational person (indicated by a coolness of demeanor, a reasonable tone, an obvious emotional distance from his own words) Ophuls is implicitly and irrevocably leading us to make the same kind of judgment of this man as a political actor. Even if Ophuls does not mean this, he must accept the responsibility for the emotional response which this man evokes in the audience. The power of a dramatic art (like film) to embody an abhorrent principle in an implicity sympathetic character makes the triumph of that principle palatable.

Those who don't see this point should think about Birth of a Nation--no matter how one may object to the ideas expressed in the film, the formal (artistic) skill with which it is made has the audience rooting for the Ku Klux Klan to come to the rescue. Try as you will to resist, you cannot help but cheer them on. The principle at work in Birth of a Nation works just as well in Sorrow and Pity.

For Ophuls, as Griffith, appeals unerringly to our unspoken but only rarely articulated assumptions about ourselves. Christian de la Masiere is cool, calm, collected and seemingly able to put a distance between his reflective and active selves. No matter how much we may hate the words and ideas he expresses, we cannot help but admire and respect these qualities. Our emotional response to these qualities of character transcends our abhorrence of the man's actions.

This enables us to see how thoroughly bourgeois the assumptions of even political radicals are. For fight it as we do, the belief that personality transcends politics is tied up with the very basis of our thinking. We could no more discard that belief than we could our sexual urges. Yet that belief is as ideologically charged as, say, the belief in the inevitability of class conflict. It is essential to capitalist rhetoric. To enshrine it artistically is to vitiate the power of any contending political and moral principles. When the issues are cast in these terms, however implicitly, the motive for social change disappears. The acceptance of this principle implies that each individual can reach earthly happiness without taking political action. And as long as this society exists and raises children in that belief, the rulers of this society will be able to justify rhetorically, even to their enemies, their irresponsible and ultimately tragic hegemony. Even if there is a revolution which topples those in power, so deeply ingrained in us is this belief in personality over politics that it will die only with us.

Having said this, I must also confess that there is moral transcendence of a different, non-ideological kind, in these movies. In A Sense of Loss, the scene in which a husband and wife tell of the bomb murder of their 17-month-old son Colin is the most moving and valid testimonial to the insanity of war that I have ever seen. And when the hero of Sorrow and Pity, the bald-headed Grave brother, admits that he knew the informer who sent him to Buchenwald but decided not to revenge himself, I was brought up short: could I have shown the same strength of character?

At that moment, and many others in these films, I was forced to recognize that there is indeed a bond that exists beyond political, social and linguistic boundaries. If the term metaphysical has any validity at all (and I believe it does) then it must truly exist to describe this bond. What Marcel Ophuls can do as well as almost anyone else is to touch with power and grace the realm in which all human beings are very much alike.