The four-and-a-half-hour Nazi documentary you can’t afford to miss

JORDAN HOFFMAN

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First released 40 years ago, ‘The Memory of Justice’ uses the Nuremberg Trials as a springboard for unanswerable questions. A newly restored version will be streaming on HBO from April 24

NEW YORK — Marcel Ophuls demands your time. Moreover, the 89-year-old documentary film director, born in Germany and holding French and American citizenship, deserves it.

The son of German-Jewish director Max Ophuls (a giant of world cinema whose films include “The Earrings of Madame de…” and “Lola Montès”), Marcel began his career as an actor and assistant director to his father in France, where his family fled during World War II. He made some successful films, including the Jean-Paul Belmondo – Jeanne Moreau romp “Banana Peel,” but in time he turned toward documentaries, making some of the most important works about the 20th century’s darkest moments.

His most lasting achievements can be seen as a trilogy. In 1969 he released “The Sorrow and the Pity,” a penetrating exposé into the culture of French collaboration during WWII. If you remember the “Annie Hall” joke about “a four-hour documentary on Nazis,” this is the one they are talking about. And that length is actually selling it a tad short.

In 1988 he won the Academy Award for “Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbi,” a thorough examination into the life of the Nazi war criminal, his capture and trial. It’s four hours and 27 minutes, and absolutely staggering.

In between these two highly-regarded works was a middle child: “The Memory of Justice,” released in 1976. A bold and philosophical project, Ophuls himself recently referred to it as “flopp[ing] pretty badly when it came out [but] the best work I ever did in my life, or at any rate the most personal and the most sincere of my films.”

 

Thanks to Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation, Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation and a handful of other organizations, this four hour and 38-minute movie — the longest of the bunch — was recently retrieved from the vault, cleaned up, given new subtitles and had all the original audio reinstated, ridding it of dubs.

So, what is “The Memory of Justice”?

Much of it focuses on the Nuremberg Trials, but it is far more than a beat-by-beat explanation of that process. It uses Nuremberg as a springboard to ask unanswerable questions. What is justice in the face of an atrocity like the Holocaust? Should the victors in a war be the ones to sit in judgement? And how can those same victors charge people with the death of innocents after blasting Dresden and Hiroshima to bits?

Director Marcel Ophuls in a still from his movie ‘The Memory of Justice.’ (Courtesy HBO)

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