Last week I felt a perversely irresistible impulse to watch Marcel Ophuls’ 1988 documentary Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie. Running for four hours twenty minutes, this is a mammoth chronicle of a man notorious even by Nazi standards, a former Gestapo chief in Lyon who was recruited by US intelligence after the war and who would later help stage a neofascist coup in Bolivia. In and of itself Barbie’s tale is one of prolific, near-grotesque malevolence, ranging from well-documented personal involvement in grisly torture to paramilitary adventures and cocaine-trafficking in South America, and yet Ophuls largely eschews sensationalism. Formally the film chiefly comprises a series of talking-head interviews in rooms, with geographical shifts signalled in perfunctory shots of local vistas and snatches of native songs, while the content is concerned with elucidating the circumstances surrounding Barbie’s activities, grappling with the tangle of contradictory accounts and the haze of participants’ poor memories (or conscious evasions). The betrayal and death of French resistance leader Jean Moulin, the recruitment of ex-SS officers as anti-Soviet intelligence agents, the overlapping worlds of Nazi exile and death-squad politics in 1970s Bolivia, are all episodes scrutinised with a near-legalistic eye. The film’s concern for minutiae, as attentive to political intricacies as to the gory details of Barbie’s exploits, could well prove challenging to those with little prior knowledge or only a casual interest in these subjects.
As other commentators have observed, the starkly terrible figure of Barbie is something of a cipher here: as an individual he remains enigmatic, just as the elderly Barbie, seen in interview footage from the time of his eventual capture, is calmly impassive in person. The film is interested rather in that wider, less spectacular guilt that emanates out from its central figure. Ophuls is unforgiving in tracing the ‘lesser’ culpabilities of those who crossed paths with Barbie, facing down everyone from the former CIC officials who worked with Barbie to an elderly woman who stood by as her Jewish neighbours were taken away by the SS.
This is a dogged, heavy and unredemptive experience, as it clearly should have been. And yet, dare one say, it possesses a strange humour and even buoyancy, mined from the human details of Ophuls’ encounters with his interviewees. There is, for instance, a perverse cosiness about the circumstances in which many of the interviews are conducted, belying the harshness and discomfort of the encounters themselves: subjects pose beside richly decked Christmas trees or swimming pools, cigars and glasses of wine are luxuriantly consumed, and Ophuls initiates one of the film’s most confrontational and sinister exchanges, with a Bolivian former bodyguard and friend of Barbie’s, while clad in a dressing-gown. Being, I confess, relatively unfamiliar with Ophuls’ work, I found myself fascinated by the severe yet urbane and ironic figure that the documentarist himself cuts throughout the film. Never quite centre-stage in the Michael Moore mould (though a couple of aggressive encounters with subjects unwilling to have themselves or their habitats filmed certainly evokes Moore), Ophuls’ angry onscreen wit nonetheless offers the view an apt guide through this litany of collective crimes, at once amplifying the horror and making it bearable.
Corner of Chance 