Cinematic Portraits of Evil: Christian de Chalonge’s Docteur Petiot and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Delicatessen
Powered By Xquantum

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

Chapter 1:  Representing Atrocity
Read
image Next

This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.

problematises the status of all art forms—including cinema—as a means of portraying historical reality, insofar as such media will naturally achieve a shift from referent (Holocaust) to self-conscious spectacle as demonstrated in Blier's Merci la Vie. 1 This idea ties in with Pierre Sorlin's view regarding the nature and function of historical films:

Historical films are fictional. By this I mean that even if they are based on records, they have to reconstruct in a purely imaginary way the greater part of what they show […] History is no more than a useful device to speak of the present time, but it does that in various ways. What is peculiar to the cinema is the simultaneous use of several systems of expression. When the makers of a film meet to prepare it, they choose a subject and they write at least the outline of a text which has its own logic, sometimes a moral, and which tends to show one or more things. 2

Langer indicates that verisimilitude should not be expected to factually represent the unimaginable as it throws into question the whole notion of plausibility. 3 Instead, the genres of farce, the fantastic and, above all, the act of artistic disfiguration must collude towards the creation of a new and fresh representation which ought to be more ‘disturbing’ than ‘pleasurable’:

The conscious and deliberate alienation of the reader's sensibilities from the world of the usual and the familiar, with an accompanying infiltration into the work of the grotesque, the ‘senseless’, is needed to purge l'univers concentrationnaire of aesthetic pleasure. 4

Many contemporary literary works had already begun to illustrate the artistic compatibility (what some would argue is the necessary fusion) between fiction and documentation. Classic