The French heritage film reconstitutes a vivid and unique portrait of France's history, where the corporeal impact of the sensual audio-visual cinematographic language, and its particular effects, styles and aesthetics, encourage spectators to have the sensation of experiencing a past that they have not directly lived and thereby to gain a potential "cinematic cultural memory" of history. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's French heritage film Un long dimanche de fiancailles combines the effects of digital cinema with heritage cinema's painterly aesthetic to create digital tableaux of the past, where a fantastic vision of history intertwines with authentic realism, alternatively offering collective audiences memories of sublime and ideal, utopian tableaux of the late Belle Epoque and early 1920s France against destructive, dystopian tableaux of World War One trench warfare on the battlefields of the Somme.
