Hôtel Terminus

Marcel Ophuls' mammoth four-and-one-half hour-long portrait of Gestapo commandant Klaus Barbie, the notorious Butcher of Lyon, is more than just a biography of another Nazi mass murderer. The film also provides a meticulous study of the forces which allowed him to survive for so long, from wartime anti-Semitism to post-war Communist paranoia to a prevailing what's-done-is-done attitude of retroactive amnesia. Ophuls is not so complacent, and makes no apologies for his sometimes confrontational approach to the subject. In his mind those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, and the sheer volume of verbal testimony, from enemies and friends alike, is only the director's way of ensuring we neither forgive nor forget. The scope of the film is vast, covering over forty years and spanning several continents, but the scale is intimate: one voice, one detail at a time, making it an exhaustive but hardly exhausting account of one monstrous but admittedly small cog in an evil machine, pieces of which are still well-oiled and operating even today.

Although this movie is quite disturbing at times, due to its subject matter, I would go as far as saying I enjoyed watching it. It has left me quite shaken up and I know I will be thinking about this film for a long time. As a lover of languages, I appreciated the jumping back and forth between French, German, and English. Overall, it is very well done. For such a serious topic, it is done with appropriate humor and pauses for reflection. It's intense, but not unbearably so. Because it made me want to learn more, to do research even, I have given Hotel Terminus a 10.

I saw "Hôtel Terminus" as part of a cycle of films dealing with Second World War, its protagonists and its effects. This was the last in the series in chronological order, but the first I saw: it was the only one dealing with modern consequences of that war. The film is what some people call a "talking heads", referring to documentaries made primarily of interviews. I did not know the term and heard it for the first time in the late 1980's in the Havana Film School. Students used it in a derogatory way. But as we all know, some talking heads are good. This one is, and a very good one. I am supposing that most everybody knows that Klaus Barbie was a Nazi agent, a torturer, then an anti-Communist spy for the CIA, that he escaped from Europe with the help of the Catholic Church and that he finally dealt with gun traffic in South America. He was caught, sent to France and judged in Lyon. In four hours and a half, Marcel Ophüls (who is not a very nice subject on camera), not only reconstructs Barbie's life, but he covers so much ground that it's noteworthy how his editors were able to maintain one's attention in so many persons, facts, dates and abundant references in the testimonies. I have been told that the film worked as an alert for the resurgence of neo-Nazis and the so-called "ordinary fascism". Well, it should be seen every now and then, because it seems that as long as there are human beings there will be totalitarians, traitors and assassins, and as long as there is a group of nations that want to control the world, there will be new holocausts. We all know that because of all the Klaus Barbies we have seen in power. This one won the Oscar as Best Documentary.

The film is very good but sags in the third hour. However, you must stay with it. Take a break, have some coffee, and come back. I saw this film a good five years ago, but the final few sentences were so moving I remember them still, word for word. It must be seen. We're talking hot tears and goosebumps.

I have always been fascinated by history as a subject and just cannot understand why so few people show any interest in it. I have no illusions, Marcel Ophüls' long documentary about the life and times of Klaus Barbie, a brutally efficient German police chief in occupied France in World War Two, will hardly convert anyone into an avid historian. But I think it is a collective testimony that will outlive the present and could be used in history classes in a number of countries all over the world. Today and tomorrow.

The director, who throughout the movie appears as an interviewer, is an angry man. He acts accordingly and knows what he wants from the faces he encounters during the making of Hôtel Terminus. And he has an almost uncanny talent to get from the interviewed what he wants. But it feels real and I am positive that Hôtel Terminus is a frank and biased documentary. Its main aim is to convey information about facts and human nature. No one will ever be able to use it for any kind of indoctrination.

Basically, the movie is a biography of Barbie, from the beginnings in provincial Germany up to his trial in the late eighties in Lyon. Ophüls visits – apparently within a very short stretch of time - the places where Barbie lived: in Germany, France and Bolivia. He talks to people there. Some have to say something about Barbie and what he did, some have not – or do not want to. A wide range of statements and non-statements is artfully woven into a tissue that shows how concerned respectively unconcerned humanity as a whole can be about past events, however terrible they are. Shots of landscapes, short sequences of documentary footage and excerpts of local folkloric or popular tunes are cleverly inserted into that texture and give the statements additional emotional weight.

The movie is very concerned about two particular incidents. This maybe constitutes a weakness because the attention is directed away from Barbie. It probes deeply into the arrest and the disappearance of legendary French resistance leader Jean Moulin and into the abduction of the «enfants d'Isieux», Jewish children who found shelter in an isolated boarding school and were betrayed to the German forces of occupation. The point here is, that Barbie as the man held responsible for the two incidents had to count on French collaborators. There were suspicions that the French authorities were for a long time not very anxious to bring Barbie to trial as he had inside knowledge that would tarnish the official history of France during World War Two. The two «sub chapters» feel as if they were made specifically for a French audience, especially in the intricate Moulin affair it is difficult for an outsider to follow.

The most striking result of Hôtel Terminus is that it shows the brutal banality of terror in a totalitarian regime. Barbie, basically a public servant with a sadistic streak who executes orders he was given, does not really become alive as a character. Somehow he gradually vanishes further and further into the background. He does not play the chief villain in this movie but is used as an example of one of many ruthless henchmen of a tyranny. The message of Hôtel Terminus is, as I see it, that only the complicity or the indifference of the "general public" made Barbie's career and the atrocities he was capable of possible.