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

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

Chapter 1:

Representing Atrocity

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within the ideological world of arts and humanities, the scientific yardstick for measuring truth can no longer function. History cannot be simplified to a pattern in a single unequivocal fashion. Variations of understanding and construal need not be viewed as negative. As Michel Foucault states, ‘Les notions fondamentales qui s'imposent maintenant sont celles de l'événement et de la série, avec le jeu des notions qui leur sont liées; regularité, aléa, discontinuité, dependence, transformation’. ⁹ The importance of this vision which contemporary cinema readily embraces is illustrated by the fact that very different biographies are increasingly being produced on the life of the same individual without any uncommon facts being evident. Any essentialist reading of history, therefore, is simply not possible, for history is not unproblematic. The views of the contemporary writer Robert Rosenstone, who examines the relationship of history and film, are of importance here:

It is time in short to stop expecting films to do what (we imagine) books do. Stop expecting them to get the facts right or to present several sides of the issue or to give a faint hearing to all the evidence on a topic or to all the characters or groups represented in a particular situation or to provide a broad and detailed historical context for events. Stop also expecting them to be a mirror of vanished reality that will show us the past as it really was. […] Films are not mirrors that show some vanished reality but constructions, works whose rules of engagement with the traces of the past are necessarily different from those of written history. How could they be the same (and who would want them to be?) since it is precisely the task of film to add movement, colour, sound and drama to the past? ¹⁰

Exasperation arising from restricted perceptions of the role of cinema had been voiced much earlier by Jean-Luc Godard.