Legendary documentarian Marcel Ophüls. The ability for people to stomach the seemingly unfathomable has long been a mainstay of Ophüls’s discerning — and some would say unforgiving — lens. (James McAuley/James McAuley/The Washington Post)

These days, Marcel Ophüls lives in the foothills of the Pyrenees, on the outskirts of a small village overlooking the mountains in the distance. The Spanish border is just over the horizon, which, in a sense, is the point.

The Academy Award-winning filmmaker, who forced France to confront its wartime past , smokes a cigarette as he speeds his silver Peugeot down a country back road toward his relatively modest house. He has lived here for decades, documenting the darkness of the 20th century. But his reasons for hiding out in the middle of relative nowhere, he insists, have more to do with return than retreat. It was over these same mountains that Ophüls and his German-Jewish family fled the Nazis in 1941 — to Spain, Portugal and, ultimately, Los Angeles. Now, he sees the mountains every day.

"You want to know why I'm here?" he asked, gesturing at the view from his terrace. "That's why. This house."

Ophüls, 89, is among the last surviving members of the generation that created Europe's postwar consciousness, a dying breed of politicians, artists and intellectuals who responded to the catastrophe of World War II to ensure it never happened again. Best known for "The Sorrow and the Pity," his nearly five-hour 1969 examination of Nazi collaboration in France, Ophüls has always been transfixed by the question of how ordinary people succumb to madness. For him, that question remains as urgent in 2017 as it was in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power.

Recently, Ophüls said, he was shocked to see certain phenomena he never thought possible become undeniable realities. The first was the election of Donald Trump in the United States, of which Ophüls remains a citizen. The second was the rise of Marine Le Pen, the daughter of a convicted Holocaust denier, in France, his other nationality. Although Le Pen ultimately lost to Emmanuel Macron in May's second round of the French presidential election with 34 percent of the vote, she transformed a party that was once a fringe into a real-life force in the European political arena. The National Front, in some form or other, is here to stay.

"She blew the election because during the last debate she got hysterical," Ophüls said, referring to Le Pen's performance in the election's final televised faceoff. "But that's just a matter of luck — it could have gone the other way."

Sometimes it does go the other way, as in the case of Trump. Ophüls's fame largely derived from having held former Nazis and their collaborators accountable on camera. The U.S. president's rhetoric and appeal have proved a surprising reminder of the subject Ophüls has spent a lifetime investigating.

"During the campaign, [Trump] refused to repudiate the Ku Klux Klan, and with what just happened in Charlottesville, it took him a very long time to cease being neutral about what had happened," Ophüls said. "And I don't think he lost a single one of his voters."

The ability for people to stomach the seemingly unfathomable has long been a mainstay of Ophüls's discerning — and some would say unforgiving — lens. Ophüls rejects the notion that his films have a "message." When pressed, he put it this way: "Howard Hughes once said: If you want to send a message, use Western Union. I've tried to avoid 'messages' my whole life." And yet there is an undeniable red thread that appears to unite much of his work.

Here is what might be called the Ophüls thesis: "One of the reasons I should be vegetarian like you is that I like animals better than people," he said. By now we are sitting on his terrace, where he eats a hamburger steak while I eat a bowl of boiled frozen vegetables he has kindly prepared for me. "Most people will put up with just about anything, just as long as it's not happening to them. That's what we call human nature."

In the late 1960s, Ophüls interviewed the likes of Christian de la Mazière, a French aristocrat so seduced by fascism that he fought on the Eastern Front in Nazi uniform. In the 1970s — mostly for "The Memory of Justice," which he considers his masterpiece — Ophüls turned his camera on the Americans who turned a blind eye to torture in Vietnam, as well as the French who refused to confront the bloody brutality that characterized the conflict in Algeria.

Along the same lines, Ophüls's latest project — stalled in production — is a film about Israel and Gaza, tentatively titled "Let My People Go." As he put it: "The thought of Jews bombarding what in my mind is nothing more than a huge concentration camp seems to me unbelievable — and that is Gaza."

One might suspect, then, that populism's return in 2017 may not have taken a man like Ophüls by surprise, although he insisted that he did not see it coming. "I'm not a prophet," he said, "and I didn't know about the disastrous effects that Facebook and Twitter would create." Years ago, he said, he created both a Facebook and a Twitter account but cannot be bothered to use either.

This is not to say he is averse to inserting his own identity in his work — quite the contrary. Along with haunting sequences of background music, an Ophüls trademark is the subtle presence of the filmmaker — cool and unflinching — throughout his films. He calls this "subjectivity," and, for him, subjectivity is the key to ethical reporting in times like these: being honest about who one is as a filmmaker or journalist, and not suffering fools when one meets them.

Elie Wiesel, another member of Ophüls's generation, put it this way: "We must always take sides. Neutrality only helps the oppressor. Never the victim." Ophüls said much the same: "If you want to defend your point of view, and not in some way lie down in front of the powers that be, it takes more courage."

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