Essay: Amélie

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain, better known as Amélie, is Jeunet’s contribution to France’s cinematic history. A critical and popular success, both nationally and internationally, Jeunet expertly employs the idea of the spectacle to provide viewers with opportunities for autonomy, emphasising the role of the audience beyond consumers of media. As a modern homage to French film, Amélie is beautifully crafted-with a deep understanding of our contemporary era and the cultural hegemony of Hollywood-to honour the past cinematic tradition of France without isolating itself from its own context and as such is a true fulfilment of Jeunet’s goal: a worthy contribution to the French cinematic tradition.
With the recovery of Hollywood in the 1970s, American films, once again, dominated the global market. As demonstrated by filmmakers such as Luc Besson, the struggle of the European filmmakers in the post-Hollywood era was either to “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, mediated by images.”
As Hollywood movies dominated the European market, the audience would increasingly become conditioned to the indulgence of the submissive experience of Hollywood cinema as Hollywood aims to represent the audience as if they are the characters in the movies. This approach causes the failure of audiences to recognise the film as a medium while also eliciting an unconscious identification between the spectators and the characters. As Canadian ‘media-guru’ Marshall McLuhan proclaims: American media imperialism hypnotises global audiences into homogenisation through the use of advanced technologies to conceal the technological medium, resulting in popular and entertaining films that promote the capitalist ideology. Congruent with the value of entertainment, cinema supports the ideological motives of Hollywood and Hollywood’s homogenisation of culture, as the visual attractions and creative narratives propagate Hollywood’s values around the world. According to Debord, the spectacle is simultaneously the result and project of the existing mode of production, the maintenance of the present model of socially dominant life. With the notion of the spectacle elevating sight, the cyclical affirmation of the dominant in Hollywood movies-as the world is filtered through mediated images-targets the masses through the unconscious and often unconsensual consumption of visuals.
For McLuhan, European filmmakers constitute his definition of ideal artists because, rather than interpreting the message on behalf of the audience, through their emphasis on the film as a medium, their work triggers a cognitive process within viewers, promoting critical thought through the combination of reality and imagination, thus empowering the autonomy of the viewer. In Amélie, Jeunet exploits the power of the image in our capitalist context to create opportunities for wonder, imagination and, as such, autonomy. In understanding the spectacle-as both the result and project of the existing mode of production- in the present model of socially dominant life, Jeunet exploits the value of the image through the surface of Amélie and the unreal visual aesthetic of the film.
Returning from Hollywood, having finished work on Alien: Resurrection, Jeunet made a commitment to himself: that he would contribute to the national heritage of French cinema;as an homage, Amélie is a patiche, rife with references to French films. Controlling every aesthetic element, Jeunet’s shots are filled with intent. Beginning with the anamorphic format (2.35:1), Truffat’s Jules et Jim is conjured. Jeunet further references Truffat through the prologue of Amélie before showing Amélie watching a clip of Juels et Jim in a theatre. Jeunet’s shots at the Canal St Martin recall Carne’s Hôtel du Nord (1938) while the whimsy and colour red, prevalent throughout the film, are reminiscent of Lamorisse’s Le Balloon Rouge (1956). Jeunet even admittedly borrowed the title for his film from Guitry’s Destin Fabulux de Desiree Clary (1942), with the use of voiceover also recalling the same film. Montmartre as a setting is connected to Truffat’s 400 Coups (1959), and Claire Mauier-Madame Suzanne-having a role in both films, further establishes a bond. In addition to Claire Maurier, Mathieu Kassovitz-Nino Quicompoix-also has significant ties to French cinema. Jeunet employs the compressed zoom to focus on Amélie multiple times through the film. With using the compressed zoom, alongside the casting of Kassovitch, Kassovitch’s film, La Haine (1995),which made famous use of the zoom, is nodded to.
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 advertisements, wooes the audience with his movie of a “stereotyped idea of Paris that exists in the world, rather than recording Paris as it exists”. With an extraordinary number of shots in the film-over 300 in the prologue alone-each shot must make an instant impression. The power of the edited image to make this impression is enhanced by the soundtrack. The soundtrack emphasises the beginning and end of each shot, with almost every scene, and many individual moments, concluding with audible finality.
Jeunet also uses close-ups to mark the end of sequences: “Looping crane shots, rapid zooms, and dizzying montage passages give way to several seconds of Tautou, absolutely still, staring directly into the camera, an object of our lingering gaze.”As with every other aspect of the film, Tautou’s face does not escape Jeunet’s aesthetic edits, serving the superficial narrative as much as-if not more than-the fantastical Paris. As a shot, close-ups, in the terms of Eisenstein, are both individuals and collectives. In presenting Amelie through close-ups, she is presented as an icon, both an “imagined friend and an inaccessible ideal”. The combination of proximity and distance that enables the success of a media icon is an ideal employed by Jeunet. Like a media icon, Amélie provides the audience with traces of reality: opportunities for autonomy, references to past-cinema, while simultaneously isolating the world of the movie through the heavily stylised aesthetics and edited visuals.
The close-up presents a dualistic paradox for the viewer. There is an intimacy in the proximity of the shot which, as severed from the ‘bigger picture’, necessitates the abstraction of information; the close-up, in its narrow perspective, refers viewers beyond the immediate. The multitude of close-ups of Tautou’s face, presents Tautou iconically, as they create a pause in the film, providing the audience with multiple instances to reflect on the image in and of itself. The power of the close-up comes from the referential value attributed to it. The close-ups of Tautou therefore give the audience an opportunity for their own autonomous imaginative response to the film by pausing the action visually and temporally. As such, the close-up is a strategy that exemplifies greater themes of the film: the spectator and the significance of the image. In presenting Tautou’s face so iconicly throughout the movie, Jeunet is provoking the relationship between film and spectatorship and subverts Hollywood’s mindlessness through creating providing a platform in which the act of autonomous thought is curated.
As an international director, trained in advertisement, and having completed a big-budget Hollywood film, Jeunet uses his understanding of the power of the image to empower his audience to acknowledge the mechanised, technically enhanced visuals presented in Amélie.
Jeunet understands the role of the watcher, the consumer of media, and in the era of Hollywood’s cultural hegemony, Jeunet uses the power of the image, the spectacle, and the cinema, to subvert Hollywood’s hegemonic experience, to creating a platform for autonomy within Amélie. Crafted with a deep understanding of the role of the image in contemporary society, Jeunet’s film expertly empowers the audience beyond mere consumers of media, without isolating itself from the contemporary context, while also film serving as an homage to French cinema.