JONATHAN BAUMBACH
601
The Memory a/Justice,
Marcel Ophuls
Ophuls's earlier nonfiction films,
The Sorrow and the Pity
and
A Sense
0/
Loss,
both of which I admire (although in descending order), did not
prepare me for the formal beauty of
The Memory
0/
Justice .
Beauty may
seem like an inappropriate word for a documentary investigating the impli–
cations of the Nuremberg Trials. The Ophuls film is not journalism, which
has given some reviewers difficulty with it, but a didactic work of art. Given
the density of the issues and the four-and-a-half-hour running time, the
film is a work of near-miraculous coherence. Ophuls uses the same tech–
niques as in the first two films, the telling juxtaposition of interviews with
historic documents, offering us a history (and philosophy) lesson through
a variety of subtly distorting mirrors. The danger of such a method is either
to leave the author's position unfocussed or to foreclose discovery in the
interest of high-minded propaganda. The power of the film is its ability to
let antithetical views stand side by side without cancelling one another out.
Although the material of
The Memory a/Justice
is more personal to Ophuls
than in the earlier work-he is a German Jew married to a woman who was
once a Hitler youth (and that is made part of the story)-the director's vision
is astonishingly lucid. To appreciate what Ophuls has accomplished, one has
to be willing to hold conflicting ideas in the mind at the same time . To
recognize, for example, that the Nuremberg Trials were, on the one hand,
self-righteous and misguided, the victors punishing the vanquished, and,
on the other, that they established principles of universal law and justice and
were motivated by the highest idealism. That they dramatized for the Ger–
mans (and others) individual and national responsibility for inhuman be–
havior and that they permitted the German people, because the trials were
conducted by outsiders, to evade guilt altogether. That the very nations that
insisted on the Nuremberg precedent willfully and arrogantly ignored it
when their own misconduct was at issue and that the Nuremberg precedent
gave moral strength to, among others, the resisters of the Vietnam War.
That the spirit of Hitler continues to dominate the century and that we are
all human and fallible and that justice is a matter of private conscience. The
film's heroes are men and women who have either intellectually or in the
example of their lives reconciled these oppositions.
The Memory a/Justice
is
finally inspiriting, a celebration, among the debris of ongoing political
injustices, of human decency and courage. As with Hannah Arendt's book
on Eichmann, Ophuls's work is bound to be misunderstood and reviled,
aspects of it taken to represent the whole. If the New York Film Festival
needed justification, and it doesn't, the first public showing of Ophuls's
great film would in itself be sufficient.
