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

of traditional approaches to historic representation. Jeunet and Caro's Delicatessen and de Chalonge's Docteur Petiot stand out from other films released in the same two years (such as Marboeuf's Pétain, Miller's L'Accompagnatrice and Berri's Uranus) through the choice of representational approaches. They are films which foreground the techniques of their own textual construction, focussing more on image and sound than on the authentic replication of a historical moment. That is to say, these are films that do not strive to create a sense of historical authenticity and do not pay meticulous attention to period detail. It will be argued that the sense of artistic freedom affords a diversion which enables the films to voice political, historical and philosophical messages. They each point to a moment repressed in the collective mind for three decades rather than gazing back to an imaginary era that never existed. By screening the fantastic and the farcical, these two films, through the use of different tools, give cinematic expression to everyday, machine-like systems of evil. Interestingly, Guy Austin, in his study ‘Contemporary French Cinema’, groups the films together with Blier's Merci la Vie (1991) as classic non-conventional films insofar as they are characterised by generic pastiche. ¹⁸ Docteur Petiot and Delicatessen stand out as films which interrogate the classical realist tradition of French cinema and of the conventional war movie in terms of their rejection (whether partial or total) of historical realism and their diverse generic approach. These two films inject an element of horror into the modern imagination which serves to alter and interrogate the viewer's perception of reality. At work are the aesthetics of atrocity, the phantasmagoric and the horrific.

Christian de Chalonge's Docteur Petiot, despite being based on a fragmentarily documented historical event, refuses to rely