Hotel Terminus (1988)
Review by M.V. Moorhead/Less Hat, Moorhead
DVD Release: October 26, 2010 (Icarus Films)
The Nazis seem to bring out the length in documentarians. It’s understandable, no doubt—if I just keep going, these filmmakers seem to be thinking, one more interview, one more visit to the site of some atrocity, maybe I’ll figure out how the Nazis happened, or how it is that people can just carry on their lives now, as if nothing happened.
The champ in this regard is Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour Shoah (1985). But there’s also the five-hour Confessions of Winifred Wagner(1975) from the twisted Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, and, of course, The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), the 251-minute scab-stripping of French collaboration during the Occupation by Marcel Ophüls, perhaps best known to American film buffs as the movie to which Woody Allen kept dragging Diane Keaton in Annie Hall.
A later Ophüls work on the Nazis, 1988’s Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, runs slightly longer than The Sorrow and the Pity. This effort, out October 26, 2010 on DVD from Icarus Films, won the Oscar that year for Best Documentary Feature. True to its title, it traces the tale of the notorious Gestapo officer—his psychotically savage torture of Jews and Resistance figures in Lyon, his protection after the war by U.S. Intelligence, who thought he would be a valuable asset against the Communists, his U.S.-backed escape from Europe via the “ratline” to South America where, incredibly, he was soon up to his old tricks in his new country, Bolivia. We’re shown his eventual expulsion from Bolivia back to France, where he was tried for crimes against humanity, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987.
Despite the comprehensive nature of the movie, however, Ophüls seems far less interested in Barbie himself than in the people around him—his cronies and stoolies and collaborators and sympathizers and protectors, all the little people who made his nightmarish career possible. As with The Sorrow and the Pity, a great deal of Hotel Terminus is devoted to watching these people squirm and eye the camera warily as Ophüls politely interviews them. Again and again and again, his subjects default back to the same notion: This all happened forty years ago, after all; isn’t it time to let all this unpleasantness go? Ophüls doesn’t think so.
The addition of another twenty-two years may have diffused some of the film’s political immediacy—Barbie was still alive when it was released (he died in 1991). But it hasn’t diluted either its intellectual fascination or its cumulative emotional power, especially in the final minutes, when one of Barbie’s victims describes, without melodrama, the risky attempt of a neighbor to help her. After more than four hours of mealy-mouthed self-justification, Ophüls offers us a small moment of human decency, and it feels like a liberation.
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