Hotel Terminus: a Vital Documentary, Even On DVD

Hotel Terminus is one of the handful of landmark documentaries by French filmmaker Marcus Ophuls (The Sorrow & the Pity).  It's an extensive (four and a half hours) exploration of the infamous "Butcher of Lyon" Nazi SS officer Klaus Barbie.  The titular hotel being where Barbie set up his gestapo headquarters in France, where he tortured and killed citizens suspected of being affiliated with the resistance during the French occupation.  Ophuls had previously been nominated for an Academy Award, but this is the one that won.  Yet as of this writing, it's still only available on DVD - From Icarus Films Home Video here in the states - but at least it's a less janky release than The Troubles We've Seen (i.e. there are actual, functioning menu screens).

If you've seen his other works, you know what to expect: constant intercutting between an impressive collection of interviews with but survivors and perpetrators of horrific war crimes, with occasional inserts of vintage footage from other sources to make his points.  And, like Troubles, to occasionally slip in his cynical humor.  Moments in this film play like a antecedent to Michael Moore's Roger & Me, like when Ophuls shows up at the front door of a former gestapo chief to ask him what crimes a 2 year-old girl could have committed against the party to make him take her away from her family.  When he gets it shut in his face, "O Holy Night" plays on the soundtrack as the director wishes the Nazi a "merry Christmas" through the door.  One of several necessarily irreverent moments amid what is naturally highly grim stuff.

2010 Icarus DVD.

Icarus's DVDs (two dual-layered pressed discs) are presented in fullframe 1.34:1, which is pretty much the proper OAR.  Actually, disc 1 is very slightly windowboxed, while disc 2 is purely pillarboxed, so the framing could probably be slightly tweaked if anyone were to restore this in 4k someday.  The film was shot on 35mm, so apart from some rough archival footage in the mix, this could probably stand to look a good deal better if they did.  Also, the frame rate seems a little screwy; some frames are interlaced (look closely at the second shot), others are duplicates.  You barely notice it in motion with all these talking heads, but I wonder if they took this from a PAL source.  Again, it's not too problematic for DVD, but definitely something to improve upon if they ever bring this to HD.

The DVDs just feature the original, multilingual mono in 2.0.  English subtitles are burnt into the picture for the foreign languages, with no subtitle option for the English audio.  There are also no extras, not even a trailer, though it does come with a nice, full-color 12-page booklet reproducing a 1989 Washington Post interview with Ophuls, which is definitely worth the read.

So obviously I'm not shy about how much I'd like to see this restored for BD and/ or UHD, but at least this film has a disc release, unlike several of Ophuls other essential documentaries, including The Memory of Justice and A Sense of Loss.  Sounds like the makings of a world class box-set to me.  But considering the state most of films have been languishing in, I'm not holding my breath.  At least we've got this.