TRIBUTES AND RETROSPECTIVES
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© Tamasa Distribution
Veillées d'armes
Marcel Ophüls
1994 - France / Germany / United Kingdom - 3h44
With humour and caustic charm, Marcel Ophuls films on the Bosnian front and takes examines war journalism. He questions the ethics of information, disinformation and manipulation.
“The first casualty when war comes is truth…”. This is the sentence that stands out in Phillip Knightley's book The First Casualty, which inspired Marcel Ophüls to make a film about reporters… Filming people as fictional characters, using narrative processes that are distant from the documentary, Ophuls blurs the lines between fiction and documentary with Veillées d'armes (The Troubles We've Seen). His film is studded with extracts from films by Huston, Hawks, Wilder and his father Max Ophuls without this ever going against the course of events. “The path traced by Ophuls within the material that he has collected is neither straight nor continuous. It is rather a multidimensional labyrinth, winding through space, time, ideas and stories”. (Jean-Michel Frodon; Le Monde)
CAST AND CREW
Screenplay : Marcel Ophüls
Cinematography : Pierre Boffety, Pierre Milon
Sound : Michel Fauré
Editing : Sophie Brunet
Production : Little Bear, Première
French distributor : Tamasa Distribution