Le Fait Divers

Le Fait Divers Revenant: Thierry Paulin




21
01
2011



Beyond text, the opacity of Claire Denis’ J’ai Pas Someil
(1993) offers a means of resistance to dominant regimes of
representation. Like the archive, meaning is drawn from the interwoven
gaps, images, signs, subjectivity and the ongoing relationship between
the author/collector (an “anarchist” according to Benjamin) and the
components of the real life story (the “subversive protests” of the
assembled items.)

Denis’ relationship to the ‘Paulin Affair’, the scandal of the
Martinican ‘Monstre de Montmartre’, Thierry Paulin, who in the mid-80s
along with his Guyanese accomplice and lover Jean-Thierry Mathurin was
arrested for killing twenty-one old women in the eighteenth
arrondissement of Paris, merits closer scrutiny. Paulin’s spectral
presence as a ‘revenant’ is testament to his ‘monstrous’ representation,
as the monster always returns and its threat lies in its ability to
sprout an extra head, resurface and return in new and more dangerous
forms.



In an interview in Cahiers du Cinéma (Jousse & Strauss)
after the release of the film, loosely based on the the Paulin affair,
Denis talked of how she grappled with this particular fait divers, not
seeking it out as a reference but rather accepting her inevitable
relationship with the story. The story kept returning to haunt her: she
realised she had met Thierry Paulin several times before he was
arrested; a friend of hers died the same day as Paulin; she became
interested in Baudrillard’s discussion of the affair. In an interview in
Autrement in 1989, Baudrillard spoke of the serial killer in
French society, on the fact that unlike the great French murderers of
the epoque, the man who had provoked such headlines as ‘France a peur’,
had today disappeared completely from public view.

Paulin’s mother still lives in France and his accomplice,
Mathurin, was released from prison in 2009. Denis’ film, though it
guards a distance from the real-life story (not wanting the mother to
relive the past horrors), can be seen as a ‘revenant’, a new text or
layering, which spurs new meanings and readings, offering the potential
to incite debates still relevant today and inform the shaping of
cultural values. While the French media bound elements of Paulin into
one ‘monstrous’ body, Denis’ project is concerned with exposing
the mechanisms of this body or social system and flagging up
its constituent, arbitrary elements.