Referencing the films of Marcel Carne, Jeunet highlights the artificial reality of Amélie. Carne’s films were not filmed on location, but on constructed sound stages, thus Carne’s City of Paris was entirely an artifice. Jeunet drew inspiration from the sets of Carne. In aiming to recreate Carne’s fiction on location, the unreality of Amélie’s Paris is heightened by the irony of filming on location, but physically and digitally modifying the shots, to recreate Carne’s artifice.
Jeunet’s emphasis on the unreality of Amélie is furthered by his contrasting of Amélie’s stylised world and the spectator’s reality: “Because an excess of originality affects reception adversely, one must know how to use signs that are dispensable-or already familiar to the ambient milieu-to be understood.” Beyond the 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.
The juxtaposition between iconicity and indexical relation through the visuals of Amélie informs the film’s thematisation of visual representation. Jeunet, using the same tactics as advertisem
