references to French cinema, with the familiarity of advertising aesthetics, highly stylised visuals of Amélie are juxtaposed by actual events tied to the reality of the audience: the death of Princess Diana. In situating his film around a real event tethered to a specific time-August 31st, 1997-Jeunet creates a temporal references that encourages an anachronistic viewing of the “retro” aesthetics of his film.
The idea of the past also presents an objective experience in viewing the film, with the past functioning as a quasi-character. Beginning with the the narration in the opening scene-an imposition of the present onto the past-and the sandwiching of the film, as it ends with a parallel narration at the end.
If the role of an author of film is to direct the lens to increasingly valuable discoveries, Jeunet, with his direction, uses his visuals to self-consciously thematise issues raised by visual representation. Controlling every element of sound and picture, Jeunet manufactured Paris’ aesthetic, digitally enhancing every-shot, erasing all traces of the unsightly reality: graffiti, pollution, crime. Jeunet as the auteur of Amélie captures the photogenie of the iconicity and nostalgia of the spectacularised Paris. In the world of the movie, Amelie’s first interaction with the past occurs in the same scene as Jeunet’s temporal reference to Diana’s death, with Amelie discovering a box of treasures hidden behind a tile of her washroom floor. The camera, located behind the tile, shoots from the point of view of the past that the box is tied to, framing Amelie outside of the wall, in the realm of the present. As Oscherwitz elaborates, “Because this scene occurs so early in the film, it functions to force identification between the spectator and the past, not merely between the spectator and Amélie.” In this scene, as with the rest of the film, Jeunet quite explicitly exploits the photogenic mobility of cinema-cinema’s mobility in space and time.
