The French feel-good flick of Spring 2001, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulin, unleashed a battle of polemics which still has film scholars arguing over whether the film's sociological aspects or aesthetics do or do not earn it a place in their conferences and courses. Although Amélie Poulin's critics reproach the film above all for the nostalgia of a whitewashed, "franco-français," good old days of Parisian neighborhood life, it is striking that the film's fetishized locales are what film scholar Giuliana Bruno has called "ciné-sites". For Bruno, the term ciné-sites plays on the linguistic slippage from ciné-cités to cine-sights or sight-seeing, which touristically in fact, means site-seeing. Ciné-cités are both studio lots so large they are named cities, like Rome's Cinecittà, and cities like Paris, repeatedly screened into a cinematic identity which becomes part of the city's identity and our imaginary relationship to it. Amélie Poulin's privileged (fetishized) sites, the neighborhoods of Montmartre and the Canal St. Martin evoke a long French cinematic tradition which involves the nouvelle vague, film noir in its many manifestations, and "poetic realism" of the 1930s.

This paper examines the always already nostalgia of Parisian city space through it's creation and re-creations by René Clair from 1923-1934. How does Clair "create a world" which both is, is not, was, was never, and yet ironically, would become Paris? In 1923 and 1928, Clair immortalized and iconographic, monumental Paris in Paris qui dort and La Tour (Eiffel Tower panoramas go back to the first years of early cinema--notably in the films of the Edison company). In his films of the early sound era, Clair's collaboration with set designer Lazare Meerson paved the way for the poetic realist Paris. Following urbanist/cinema theorist Paul Virilio's work on perception, I argue that the Clair-Meerson "urban" studio creations in Sous les toits de Paris, Le Millon, and Quatorze Juillet cristallize a more real than real Parisian space--becoming the model of Parisian memories. What then are the implications of the interplay between the studio Paris as exemplified by the work of Clair's teams and cinematic Paris as it has become in the present day? How can we read the paradox of films from the1930s which were already bound in a nostalgic relationship to the "real" city now functioning as the reference point for other nostalgic films?