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

the Vichy state was never a legitimate state, Jacques Chirac was the first French head of state to recognise France's responsibility for such acts. The rejection of Chirac's declaration by various contemporary politicians and the simultaneous exposure of an increasing number who had worked for the Vichy state served only to deepen the sense of crisis and conflict.

The revolutionary climate of 1968 provided fertile ground for cinema to question accepted interpretations regarding France's past and its role during the Second World War. Conflicting discourses that arose as a result of the various revelations were not restricted to mainstream political debate but also articulated themselves through the cultural sphere, particularly that of cinema. It was not really until after this date that cinema began to fully expose political and historical realities and to progressively demythologise erroneous images by ‘unwriting’ the proposed ‘version’ of French history during the Occupation. Nevertheless, the 1955 creation of Nuit et Brouillard remains a powerful call to awareness, particularly via the archival images of the dead and the dying and in the concluding voice-over which alerts its audience to the advent of new executioners, ‘nouveaux bourreaux’. Modern systematic practitioners of evil, who appear no different from us, hide a devious agenda and calmly inhabit our own societies. They may be found ‘quelque part parmi nous’. The end of the film voices a resonant warning regarding the grave dangers of presumption and naivety for such ignorance, warns Resnais, and fosters collective assumptions that the ‘monster’ is buried under the ruins of time and no longer lives in society today. Resnais exposes the perils of subscribing to those obscure myths which claim that humanity has been healed of such totalitarian diseases.