“We’ll always have Paris,” Rick says to Ilsa at the end of “Casablanca,” and for movie lovers this is certainly true. Even as genre preferences shift and digital technology messes with our cinematic sense of place, Paris is durable, indispensable, infinitely photographable.

Of course just about any city, seen in the proper light, can look good on the screen. But Paris is special. Its uniquely dense weave of narrow streets and broad boulevards discloses an apparently limitless reservoir of perspectives and moods. Any effect, theme or motif you can contemplate is likely to have a Paris address.

You can recognize these local habitations even if you have never visited the city. When you do visit, you often have the uncanny feeling of walking through a movie. And it is often in movies that the city seems most itself. The actual Louvre, imposing as it may be, comes alive when encountered in the sprint through its galleries undertaken by Arthur, Franz and Odile in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Band of Outsiders.”

The city serves Hollywood most handily as a backdrop for romance and mystery , but it can also accommodate action thrillers and other entertainments. Paris is set in stone and at the same time infinitely fungible. Having been around forever, it never grows old, and so is susceptible to perpetual reinvention: by the wizards of Pixar, for instance, who folded its landmarks and ambience into “Ratatouille,” and by Christopher Nolan, who digitally folded up its geography in one of the most memorable scenes in “Inception.”

Quentin Tarantino paid similar tribute in “Inglourious Basterds.” His intrepid, Nazi-fighting blond Jewish heroine is, crucially, the operator of a small, independent movie house in a quiet quartier.

Paris is, first of all, the city where French movies come from. And French movies compose a rich and unbroken tradition of glamour and artistry dear to every true movie lover’s heart. But this alone would not necessarily distinguish Paris from Rome or Hong Kong or any other hub of film production. Paris is, more significantly, where movies from everywhere else book their transit from the local to the universal. Los Angeles may be the epicenter of the movie business, but Paris is the world capital of cinephilia.

The notion that movies could be treated as a bona fide art form may not have originated in France, but the idea found a home there. From the end of the war through most of the 1960s the Cinematheque Francaise, run by Henri Langlois, functioned as a free-form school of film history .

It was there, in screening rooms tucked into the Palais de Chaillot, that the young critics of the Cahiers du Cinema absorbed Hollywood movies and dreamed up the New Wave. It was there that Mr. Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Eric Rohmer embraced and debated the seminal work of Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray and John Ford before stepping behind the camera themselves .

Classic American cinema, as a canon and an artistic ideal, is a largely French invention, flourishing at the Cinematheque and revival houses throughout the city.

I am speaking from personal experience. When I was a teenager my mother and I spent a summer in the city. During the day, I would spend the morning in French class and the afternoons wandering freely. In the tiny cinemas clustered around the Place de l’Odeon and the Boulevard St.-Michel, I sat and watched subtitled prints of English-language movies.

Now we all live in the presence of a digital cinematheque. More and more, previously obscure films become widely available . “The Big Sleep,” for example, loses nothing when watched on a high-quality DVD transfer.

But Paris and its cinephile monuments are still there. In 2005 the Cinematheque moved into a gleaming new home, designed by Frank Gehry, on the other end of the Seine. But on a recent visit I stumbled upon some of the haunts of my youth, still playing some of the same movies. They felt like holdovers from a fragile, receding past, and also, defiantly, like the center of the universe. Which they are - which Paris will always be - for anyone who loves movies.


A. O. SCOTT ESSAY