La Cite Des Enfants Perdus or The City of Lost Children is a film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, the same team that made Delicatessen, and Amelie, and later worked together on Jeunet’s Hollywood project Alien: Resurrection. In an interview with the two, Jeunet says:

[we] were thinking of world depopulated of dreams, dark and gloomy. That someone who didn't dream but, just the same, lived very well, yet would want to see, in dreams, a greater dimension of the imagination. For us, someone who is deprived of that is condemned to die. That's part of what we wanted to say...If one cannot dream and imagine things, and if one is sentenced to the everyday, to reality, it's awful.

In The City of Lost Children, it is one character that is forced to live without imagination; in Baudrillard’s Simulacra & Simulation, it is not only the individual that is condemned so:

It is no longer possible to manufacture the unreal from the real, to create the imaginary from the data of reality. The process will be rather the reverse: to put in place "decentered" situations, models of simulation, and then to strive to give them the colors of the real, the banal, the lived; to reinvent the real as fiction, precisely because the real has disappeared from our lives. A hallucination of the real, of the lived, of the everyday—but reconstituted, sometimes even unto its most disconcertingly unusual details, recreated like an animal park or a botanical garden, presented with transparent precision, but totally lacking substance, having been derealized and hyperrealized (Simulacra and Simulation)



Katsuhiro Otomo’s Steamboy, which was a ten year project to painstakingly recreate a Victorian Manchester and London that never was, and last week’s film Brazil that take the idea of a Steampunk past and extrapolate the present from it. The City of Lost Children is not is not so easy to locate historically. Steamboy, for instance, begins with the words ‘Manchester 1866’, and Brazil starts with the words ‘somewhere in the twentieth century, at 8.49PM’. The City of Lost Children, on the other hand, only suggests it occurs somewhere in the long Victorian age. It employs many techniques and devices that place it somewhere in the past but refuses to be specific. It is, therefore, more self-reflexive upon its depiction of history, and of Baudrilliard’s declaration that history is ‘our last great myth’.

Perhaps more so than the other two films shown in this season, The City of Lost Children highlights the connections between Steampunk and the Gothic. The film goes to great lengths to construct a particular mood and atmosphere, and its themes and conceits bring into mind a multitude of Gothic literatures and cinematic texts, from Frankenstein to Alien.

If contradiction is at the heart of the Gothic, it is most certainly also at the heart of Steampunk, most noticeably in the contradictory effects of technology in society. Steampunk, refuses to allow technology to seamlessly integrate into the societies it represents. Technology is never allowed to appear organic or natural, but must allows be shown on the outside gleaming in brass and with the innards of its machinery on display, and against every positive, its negatives are posited. The Cyclops army in The City of Lost Children have the benefit of a third eye – a device called the ‘Optacon’ that enables them to ‘see through sound’. For this, however, they had to give up part of their biology, a real eye, and suffer from the discomfort of everyday sounds – like the chewing of food.



The film also depicts a group of clones, who are almost unable to function due to their constant bickering over which of them is the original. Technological advancement, in The City of Lost Children, seems to be about losing something utterly human, in fact in all the films in this season, technology is positioned against humanity. It would be a ludicrous and reactionary standpoint to desire a time before technology. Even fire and the wheel are technologies, and so there is no time within human memory where technology did not exist. But it is clear that, sometime during or after the Industrial Revolution, and entrenched during the Silicon Age, the relationship between humanity and technology has altered fundamentally. This season has been about trying to identify the films that aim to understand that shifting relationship, but by no means are the films screened over the three weeks to be considered the only films in which these ideas can be seen at play.

The cinematographer in The City of Lost Children was Darius Khondji, who shot Delicatessen but also, and probably more famously, shot Se7en, the costume design was by Jean-Paul Gaultier, and the score was composed by Angelo Badalamenti, a long time collaborator with David Lynch, working with him on Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, and Mullholland Drive.

Ron Perlman was cast as One, the strongman whose ambiguous relationship with the girl Miette serves as a key theme for the film. Ron Perlman is an American actor who cannot speak French at all. He learnt all his lines by memory and referred back to the English translations he had to make sure he understood what he was saying. Jeunet and Caro chose Perlman over the French candidates they had auditioned because of his unique physical features. Jeunet later used Perlman in Alien: Resurrection as Johner, and, as an interesting aside, Perlman made his acting breakthrough playing the lion-faced Vincent in that TV version of Beauty and the Beast back in the late 1980s.



The City of Lost Children is visually a stunning piece of cinema. It was the first French film in over 40 years to be shot entirely in studio. There were intricate sets built against green screens, which enabled matte painting and computer generated images to be applied in post-production, adding extra depths and dimensions to the artwork which Caro supplied as many of the backgrounds.