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

representations, this aside from any construction of meaning. As Austin states:

One may argue that the unique character of the Holocaust experience ‘demands’ rather than merely ‘accommodates’ artistic disfiguration—a reality so fantastic and extraordinary (or sub-ordinary) that it denounces all structured formulations of human logic and defies the basic human notions of empirical reality, the raw material of every mimetic art. The reality of the Holocaust may itself be considered an ‘unreality’, not through denial of historical fact but through the very magnitude of this fact as it awaits mental absorption. The concentration camp may, in this sense, be considered a place of fusion, a place where that which is real and that which is unreal (in terms of its inconceivability) co-exist as a fundamental principle of experience. How does and how should cinema respond to this co-existence? Cinema must seek somehow to locate within itself the means to penetrate the darkest recesses of human experience and tear itself away from conventional thought patterns. The necessity of such a response coincides with Langer's recognition of the requirement of cinema to