Marcel Ophuls, an Academy Award-winning filmmaker whose landmark documentary “The Sorrow and the Pity” debunked the myth of widespread French resistance to the Nazi occupation during World War II, died over the weekend in France. He was 97.

The death of the German-born documentarian was announced by his grandson, Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert, according to The New York Times. He did not provide further details.

Ophuls earned his Academy Award — as well as prizes from the Cannes and Berlin film festivals— for "Hotel Terminus” (1988), a 4-hour, 27-minute documentary that examined the life of the notorious Klaus Barbie, convicted in Bolivia of his Nazi war crimes in 1987.

But his signature work was the 1969 film “The Sorrow and the Pity,” a documentary about the central French industrial city of Clermont-Ferrand. Ophuls interviewed citizens in the city who either collaborated with the Nazis and the Vichy regime or actively resisted the German occupation.

Ophuls spent more than two years compiling the more than 60 hours of footage that was eventually edited to a 4-hour, 11-minute film.

The film, when screened by patrons in Paris, was met with outrage, shock and tears. It pierced the myth fostered by Charles de Gaulle that a vast majority of the French population were either active members or sympathizers with his resistance movement.

Originally produced for television, “The Sorrow and the Pity” was banned from French airwaves until 1981. Some politicians denounced Ophuls, calling the film a “prosecutorial” film that portrayed the French people as cowardly.

“It doesn’t attempt to prosecute the French,” Mr. Ophuls said during a 2004 interview with The Guardian. “Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?”

In a 2000 interview with The New York Times, Ophuls said any message implying French cowardice was “pompous, stupid and prosecutorial.”

“I did not set this up to set up France for being collaborators,” he said. “In times of great crisis, we make decisions of life and death. It’s a lot to ask people to become heroes. You shouldn’t expect it of yourself and others.”

Ophuls also created other influential documentaries like “A Sense of Loss” (1972), centering on the Protestant-Catholic conflict in Belfast; “The Memory of Justice” (1976), which focused on the Nuremberg trials and the Vietnam War; and “Veillees d’armes” (1994), about journalists under siege in Sarejevo.

Ophuls was born on Nov. 1, 1927, in Frankfurt. After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, family members, who were Jewish, fled to France and became citizens in 1938. When the Nazis invaded that country in 1940, the family fled to the United States and settled in Hollywood, California.

Ophuls moved back to France in 1952. Four years later he married Regine Ackermann; she survives him, along with their three daughters and three grandchildren.

At the time of his death, Ophuls was working on a documentary about Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.

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