The ravages of the First World War ensured that the deeply
cherished Enlightenment ideals of reason, individualism, and
intellectual supremacy finally crumbled and dissolved. As the
Dadaists and Surrealists demonstrated in overtly defiant
avant-garde postures and various public spectacles, the essential
purposelessness and futility of such unprecedented carnage and
bloodshed had finally shattered all intellectual illusions ever
pertaining to human meaning and logic. The steady stream of
political developments which led to the onset of war were equally
incidental and senseless, while incessant killings between
deadlocked armies exposed the equal guilt and reprehensibility of
all warring parties. Numerous artists--many of whom perished during
the war--found themselves involved in the bloody battles, and their
chilling accounts--the cultural canons of poems, novels, essays,
paintings, and diaries on the horrors of this war--are all
dominated by genocidal images of mass human slaughter, inhumane
massacre, unspeakable atrocities, and the profound despair that
arises from utter senselessness. The Second World War, however, was
not simply a repeat of the First World War in terms of its
devastating effects, its atrocities, massacres, and widespread
carnage. The Nazi era manifested a completely different reality, an
unprecedented phenomenon with new and unfamiliar cultural
implications. The carnage was not 'senseless', for it was highly
rationalized and systematised; bloodshed was motivated by fierce
ideological convictions. Many of these ideologies were nourished
and inspired by the ideas of Nietzsche concerning the imposition of
a 'super regime', able to rise above the restrictive morality of
ordinary men. While it is impossible to create a clear division
between categories of right and wrong, evil and good, throughout
the career of the Third Reich, the ambiguities and perceptions of
equal guilt and equal reprehensibility that overshadowed the
previous world war were largely absent from the second. Highly
masterminded and systematised evil forces were responsible for the
bloodshed which took place, for in full operation was a
rationalised, strategic regime which meticulously orchestrated,
calculated, and supervised a systematic process of ethnic
cleansing. The rationale of the concentration camp universe
indicates not merely the decline and dissolution of reason in the
face of absolute evil, but something other than this, something
much deeper. This war was to do with 'presence' rather than
'absence'. It was a war of extreme, conceived purpose involving the
presence of a new collective political force and new methods:
'lebensraum', autarky, world domination. This book seeks to
establish a new way of examining not only history but contemporary
manners of historical representation on film, as well as their
cultural and philosophical implications. It aims to advance new
ways of investigating the past with films that are, on the surface,
only tangentially related to traditional manners of historical
representation. The work forwards two unconventional movies Docteur
Petiot and Delicatessen as objects of historical film-making. The
reasoning for this departure from convention, that the Holocaust
itself requires a peripheral, even postmodern approach to not only
its representation but that of the past in general. On a more
specific level, France during the 1990s experienced a heightened
period of political debate regarding its collaboration during the
Vichy period. Various contemporary films focused on national
complicity and crisis of identity. The two films studied may be
viewed as discourses that each relate to this crisis not only in
the light of their content but through diversity and departure from
accepted traditions within cinematic representation.
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