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8) 2000) 2)
The Visual Voice
Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie Marcel Ophüls
France, 1988 35mm, black and white, 267 min Director: Marcel Ophüls Cinematography: Michael Davis, Pierre
Boffety, Reuben Aaronson, Wilhelm Rosing, Lionel Legros, Daniel Chabert, Paul Gonon Screenplay: Marcel Ophüls Editing: Albert Jurgenson, Catherine Zins Sound: Michel Trouillard, Anne Weil Production: Marcel Ophüls, John Friedman, Peter Kovler, Hamilton Fish Screening Copy: Academy Film Archive Awards: Academy Award Best Documentary, FIPRESCI Prize Cannes Film Festival, Peace Film Award Berlin International Film Festival
Marcel Ophüls:
Matisse ou le talent du bonheur (1960) L’amour à vingt ans (1961) Peau de banane (1963) Feu à volonte (1964) Munich ou la paix pur cent ans (1967) Die Ernte von My Lai (1970) Auf der Suche nach meinem Amerika (1970) A Sense of Loss (1973) The Memory of Justice (1975) Fritz Kortner/Kortnergeschichte (1979) November Days (1989) The Troubles We’ve Seen (1994)
Hôtel Terminus was Nazi officer Klaus Barbie’s headquarters. Dubbed the “Butcher of Lyon” during the Second World War, Barbie was extradited from Bolivia to France in 1987 to stand trial for crimes against humanity. Hôtel Terminus is less a biography of Barbie than an inquiry into the way humanity deals with evil. It was the indifference of so many to the past and the alarming ease with which people tend to forget that shocked Marcel Ophüls and made him decide to make this documentary. He spoke with 80 people in France, Germany, Bolivia, Peru and the United States who at one time or another were involved with Barbie’s life or career. We meet friends from Barbie’s youth, tortured people from the Resistance, collaborators, former C.I.A. agents, Nazi hunters and former Bolivian politicians. Additionally, Ophüls invites a few commentators to speak, including Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah. He allows his interviewees to give their own versions of history, but doesn’t refrain from putting the pressure on with some tough questions as well.
The House Is Black Forough Farrokhzad
Iran, 1962 35mm, black and white, 20 min Director: Forough Farrokhzad Cinematography: Soleiman Minasian Editing: Forough Farrokhzad Production: Ebrahim Golestan Screening Copy: Int. Kurzfilmtage
Oberhausen GmbH
Forough Farrokhzad: Yek atash (1963)
This documentary short, the only film made by Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad (19351967), is one of the very first film essays and qualifies as a precursor to the Iranian New Wave. The House Is Black captures life in the Baba Baghi leper colony, a small village where the inhabitants live from day to day. They go to the market, eat, knit, smoke and play board games. Meanwhile, the children go to school. Some of them are visibly affected by the disease while others look healthy—for now, at least. Farrokhzad’s voiceover provides the images with poetic commentary in which she mixes texts from the Bible and the Koran with her own poetry. A succession of attentive black-and-white shots endows the deformities with their own beauty and melds together daily moments of pain, despair, warmth and joy into a profoundly human document. Farrokhzad’s goal was “to wipe out this ugliness and to relieve the victims.”
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