(France 1988 267m) not on DVD
Aka. Hôtel Terminus: Klaus Barbie, sa vie et son temps
We are part of the continent
p Marcel Ophuls d/w Marcel Ophuls ph Michael Davis, Pierre Boffety, Ruben Aaronson, Wilhelm Rosing, Lionel Legros, Daniel Chabert, Paul Gonon ed Albert Jurgenson, Catherine Zins narrator Jeanne Moreau
A problematic film in many ways, Hotel Terminus was the last of the three canonical documentaries about World War II made by Marcel Ophuls in the space of twenty crusading years, following trail-blazing resistance documentary The Sorrow and the Pity and its successor The Memory of Justice. At the third time of asking, Ophuls won his Oscar, and if the award itself is irrelevant to true film scholars, it was long overdue. Without Ophuls, it’s difficult to imagine the terrain of modern documentary film-making; would Shoah and Gulag, two kindred spirit works also in this selection, have been made but for Ophuls’ success? Would debate about his subjects have intensified to such a degree without them? The answer to both questions is surely no.
The title refers to the hotel where Barbie’s Gestapo had their headquarters in occupied France during the war. It could also, in a sick, twisted way, seem in retrospect a perfect euphemism for the death camps that awaited his victims. In his time as head of the Gestapo in Lyon, he personally tortured several thousand people, and famously captured and executed the Resistance leader Jean Moulin in 1943. More infamously still was his deportation of dozens of Jewish children in 1944. The first film covers Barbie’s crimes in the form of interviews with both survivors and those living in the modern environs, who are asked their opinions on Barbie and his capture and trial.
Part two essentially details his escape, via what became known as the Monastery Route, through the help of Nazi-symapthiser extreme Catholics, to South America, where he joined and met up with the likes of Eichmann and Mengele. Even there he is exposed for nefarious, if less deadly practices, swindling people out of fortunes and then accusing them of treason for unmasking him. People in and around La Paz in Bolivia are asked about the man they knew as Klaus Altmann – and what they felt about his crimes.
Ophuls’ bravest decision was to have the film virtually entirely free of photos and film footage of the actual atrocities. In retrospect one wonders whether it was influenced by Lanzmann’s decision to do exactly the same in Shoah a few years earlier. Lanzmann was interested in testimony. The footage was well-known and had lost much of its impact due to overexposure in the forty years since the war. Perhaps Ophuls felt the same way, and his film is likewise a testimony, and yet it is more besides. It’s also a piece of investigative journalism. There are occasions where one feels Ophuls begin to adopt an almost Paxmanesque stance to those he is questioning, one is almost tempted to say interrogating. Not that he shouldn’t, of course, it’s entirely justified, and one does get inner satisfaction at watching some of the collaborators – both in France and in South America – squirming in their seats to avoid the question at hand, but it comes a little close to a Michael Moore polemic for comfort on occasions. The big difference being that Moore uses his encounters to illustrate a pre-conceived stance, whereas Ophuls is crusading after the truth, and in approaching people’s doors or crossing their property, he often comes across as an avuncular, benevolent landlord figure. One doesn’t get any closer to understanding Barbie the man, for how can we? But, in that famous interview with Barbie which is featured here, one does get a glimpse into the mindset of dispassionate, unrepentant evil. An evil which is all the more shocking because Barbie conforms to an almost cliché of modern evil, so that whenever people are interviewed about killers who lived near to them, they reply “he looked like an ordinary man.” Indeed, several commentators have recalled Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil”, and without wishing to seem unoriginal, it was never better illustrated than here.
This is a very good review, and if you’ve already saturated my Wonders queue with a number of draining films about Nazis, I can’t really begrudge you – this film, which was I was familiar with but had never seen (nor The Sorrow and the Pity) sounds fascinating.
I wonder what Ophuls’ influence has been on Errol Morris. Some of your statements somehow made me think of him.
I have this one too now MM. I saw it years ago and I praised it effusively.
Yet another film on Allan’s list that made my TOP 25 (posted weeks ago). Seem The Grand Inquistor and myself think a lot alike! THE BIG QUESTION OF THE DAY: Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Aside from my last statement I’ll add that this is a film that has stayed with me for years after I first screened it. Its both horrifying and fascinating at the same time. The life this man lived and the grand escape he would purvey could turn your stomach and work like a great caper flick in unison. Like Ophul’s extraordinary THE SORROW AND THE PITY, the director keeps things intensely interesting at all times to divert us, the viewers from the big message as it slowly but surely seeps into us. Documentaries are rarely this informative and entertaining. A truly great films with none of the monotonous cliche’s noticeable in most documentaries of the time. I wouldn’t rank this as high as the directors masterpiece (SORROW AND THE PITY), but it comes damn close. Ophul’s work is an inspiration for documentarians ever since.