“The Memory of Justice, like a sickly child, has always been a favorite offspring of mine. It also seems to me particularly relevant to what is happening these days in the world.” —Marcel Ophüls, February 2003

This monumental film, no longer available in the United States, is perhaps Marcel Ophüls’s most controversial work as well as one of his greatest. The Memory of Justice explores the nature of war crimes and the possibility of justice by juxtaposing the Nuremberg Trials with the conflict in French Algeria and the war in Vietnam, but, as Ophüls eloquently argues, “to compare is not to equate.” This complex film employs dialectical juxtapositions, relevant visual motifs, and complex sound/image patterns to force the audience into confronting the necessity of judgement and justice, no matter how complicated or difficult. The Memory of Justice is also a self-reflexive work about the making of a film that links past, present, and future on the grand scale of world history with the personal history of Ophüls’s wife, children, father, and himself and their relationship to the events which precipitated the Nuremberg Trials. In short, this is one of the documentary masterpieces of the 20th century.