What I love about the documentaries of Marcel Ophuls is that they are so far-ranging and dogged in their pursuit of the truth, so fastidious in their attempt to be fair to everyone. Even if the ultimate truth—as truth will—remains elusive and relative, Ophuls casts his net so skillfully and so wide that he catches the next-best thing. And that is the complexity of the human condition, the contradictoriness of human nature, with its predictability shot through with surprises.
Ophuls is the bane of producers. He always shoots longer and more, and has a harder, longer time editing than they can bear. But how else can a man proceed if his passion is to get at what is morality, what is right, what is justice, the triune question that haunts him? This universal question must be approached in terms of specific murky incidents, which raise the anterior question of what really happened, of what is truth? And that, as Ophuls keeps discovering, is often impossible to ascertain.
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