Sample Solution

“reject the American model and lose viewers, or try to imitate Hollywood with a local accent.” With the struggle of competing against Hollywood and the consequent decline in the export of films, there was a growing conservatism in investors and, as such, experimentation in film dwindled. To compete with Hollywood’s technological innovation-high speed chases, explosions-European filmmakers focused on creating a captivating surface to their films, with the striking image to serve as the ultimate spectacle. In France, this trend manifested itself in the Cinema du Look. A highly artificial aesthetic, Cinema du Look drew visual inspiration from mass culture-music videos, advertisements, fashion photography-to create an aesthetic of surfaces, speaking to the realities of the capitalist era and the significance of the image.

Often classified as a film in the genre of the Cinema du Look, Amélie’s carefully constructed cinematic aesthetic is reflective of the voyeuristic values of the contemporary capitalist society, or to use Debord’s term: the society of the spectacle. With a background in advertising, Jeunet’s aesthetic vision in Amélie is extremely attractive, as attractive as an ad. In understanding the value of aesthetics in the contemporary era, Jeunet’s modus operani resides within the visuals of Amélie; he embeds his message within the surface of his film.

Film, defined as movable images marking the recording of history in space-and-time and sight-and-sound, is an extension of the human consciousness, occupying our imaginative capabilities. In the words of Marx and Engels, “the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force…For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled…to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society… it has to give its ideas the form of universality”. Film, as a medium, enhances and exacerbates this framing of universality, as the medium also functions to-in the case of American media imperialism-hypnotise global audiences into mass cultural homogenisation. “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, media