Cinematic Portraits of Evil: Christian de Chalonge’s Docteur Peti ...

In response to a question regarding the future of Holocaust cinema as an art form and the likelihood of it ‘withering away because it did not know how to bear witness?’ Godard clarifies his artistic conviction: ‘It is not a matter of bearing witness. It is because it was the only instrument — no microscope, no telescope, only cinema’. ¹¹ This statement points to cinema's concern with the creation of a ‘vision’ for the world to look back on rather than presentation of intricate and objective witness-bearing. Godard was quick to acknowledge the controversy surrounding his own position as a filmmaker by refusing to submit to stereotypes and conventional cinematographic forms. He considered his primary duty to be the exposure of those ambiguities, apparent contradictions and nuances of historical reality that others sought to repress. Godard's approach voiced the notion that cinema's non-adherence to generic stereotype and conscious foregrounding of textual techniques was in fact an integral part of its resistance to social, political and artistic stereotype: ‘As a maker of films, I'm in occupied territory. I'm in the Resistance. It's the idea of working for all sides — showing vagueness and not painting people black and white’. ¹² The paradox between history and self-conscious spectacle is, for Godard, not so much ‘an age-old dilemma’ as a specific problem of post-modern cinema in ‘an age of testimony’. From his viewpoint, the real challenge involves not the maximisation of historical authenticity but a blurring of the stereotypical boundaries between representational forms. As Foucault aptly notes, ‘L'histoire, telle qu'elle pratiquée aujourd'hui, ne se détourne pas des événements; elle en élargit au contraire sans cesse le champ; elle en découvre sans cesse des couches nouvelles’. ¹³ Filmmakers in this sense should liberate the medium, resist systematisation and seek to experiment self-consciously with the medium of film. This would allow cinema to redefine itself as