A common criticism about movies is that they somehow failed to represent reality. This is an interesting charge because movies, unlike reality television shows, do not claim to film life as it is. Actors do not (often) portray themselves. The same criticism can be leveled to Amelie. Amelie portrays a certain amount of surrealism throughout the movie. The characters are whimsical, idiosyncratic and sometimes capricious. I would argue that this movie does not represent reality, in the sense that it is unlikely that an analogous group of characters exist in the world.
The editing in the movie further heightens the sense of surrealism. Several sequences are shown in fast-motion, and the eponymous character often breaks the fourth wall, updating the audience on her thoughts with surreptitously whisper and a shy, sidelong glance.
Despite these artifices of movie making techniques, Amelie still feels authentic. It portrays a world which perhaps doesn’t exist but perhaps should exist.
Walter Benjamin argues in ”The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that the mass production of art, and the ensuing destruction of their “aura”, has changed the role of art from one “being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics” (Section IV). Because of mass production, the aura, or authenticity, of a piece of art is no longer an important criterion. In the past, “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (Section II). However in mediums such as photography, “one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense” (Section III) Art is no longer something that carries significant value simply because it exists (specifically in a precise, unique moment in spacetime).
The devaluation of the importance of authenticity is what allows films to evaluated in the fashion which is it today. Benjamin uses the process of editing to show that “Nothing more strikingly shows that art has left the realm of the “beautiful semblance” which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive” (Section IX). Likewise, Amelie is an example of art which has transcended the strict laws that bound art to reality.
By drawing an analogy between magician and surgeon to painter and cameraman, Benjamin argues that the cameraman, like the surgeon, is able to offer “an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art” (Section XI), through mechanical equipment. Benjamin argues that the “cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law” (Section IX). In the present, it does no longer make sense to value art with the old criteria of authenticity, and it is under the new laws which Amelie must be appreciated and enjoyed.
