Abstract
Amid the furore surrounding Amélie ’s digitally enhanced Paris, what has been overlooked is the fact that the film self-consciously thematises evolving technologies of vision and the modes of temporality they deploy, using the death of Princess Diana as the pretext for a meditation on the nature of iconicity. Amélie may be of the digital age, but it continually points nostalgically to the indexical, privileging the immediacy of human contact over mediatised, iconic identification. The film emphasises contingency as a form of resistance against hyper-rationalised, linear temporality, reflected in the tension between singularity and systematisation, or chance and fate (le destin).
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