eferences 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 intima>