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

a fluid and creative art form. As Camus also states of his contemporaries, ‘notre époque est plutôt celle du reportage que de l'œuvre de l'art. Il lui manque un juste emploi du temps’. ¹⁴ Critics and analysts are so preoccupied with presentation of evidence that they often bear witness to factual deficit rather than to the silencing or ‘fragmentation’ of the victim's voice. The reaction of Jean-François Lyotard to Robert Faurssion's denial of Holocaust evidence negates the accepted link between persuasion and proof and elucidates the precarious link between verification and reality. Reality, he affirms, should, in no circumstance, be made dependable on verification. Artistic focus should be expression rather than scrutiny. This ties in with Rosenstone's view that ‘the truth of history does not reside in the verifiability of individual pieces of data, but in the overall narrative of the past’ ¹⁵ . It should involve itself with consequence rather than sequence, thereby allowing artists to embrace various levels of reality, including the reception and perception of history by the individual and collective memory. Applying this conviction to cinema's quest to represent the war period, Godard indicates that the synergy of history and imagination is not so much an inevitability, but rather an artistic necessity. In 1963 he was attacked for combining newsreel footage with what he termed ‘improvised farce’ in his film Les Carabiniers. During his defence he problematised cinematic representation of concentration camps and pointed to the dangers of oversimplifying history by failing to delocalise evil from those in command and by seeking to categorise judgement.