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

Chapter 1

Representing Atrocity

The question remains of how best to represent the French Occupation within cinematic discourse. The extensive political and intellectual debate regarding the extent of collaboration and the ‘real’ condition of France during the Vichy period which characterised the 1990s provided a frame for various films to examine this period in a fresh light. Bertrand Blier, in his film Merci la Vie, calls for this examination by exposing the artifice of the traditional war film. When Raymond the film director is being ‘farcically’ tortured he demands to know whether he is being shot by real or fake bullets, and throughout the film the conventional divisions of monochrome for the past are totally random and unrelated to the chronology of the film's narrative. Lawrence Langer, in his study of the Holocaust and the literary imagination, claims that testimonial presentations will always exist as a subjective force. He suggests that the presence of this force