The Oscar-winning French documentarian Marcel Ophuls has died at 97, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Ophuls, who died at his home in the south of France, was a renowned filmmaker whose documentaries were rooted in the realities of war. He won his Oscar for his 1988 film Hotel Terminus, a four-hour and 27-minute documentary focused on Klaus Barbie, a Nazi general who was known as the “Butcher of Lyon” due to his command of a gestapo in the French city and who was convicted for war crimes in 1987. Ophuls was also the director of 1969’s The Sorrow and the Pity, which examined the Nazi occupation of the French city of Clermont-Ferrand. The film was featured prominently in Woody Allen’s 1977 Annie Hall, which sees Annie hesitant—and then eager—to sit through the four-hour epic. The film roiled France, which didn’t allow the film to be screened in the country for 12 years after it was filmed. Ophuls also pursued a career at news organizations, working with CBS News and ABC’s 20/20.
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