“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, and even among viewers allergic to subtitles or indifferent to the antique glories of the Nouvelle Vague, Paris is durable, indispensable, infinitely photographable. Multimedia Slide Show A Filmable Feast Of course just about any city, seen in the proper light, through sensitive eyes, can look good on the screen. Venice and Prague have held on to the delicate Old World beauty that Paris, as obsessed with modernity as with self-preservation, has let slip. Other capitals of film production — Rome in its midcentury glory, Mumbai more recently— have obligingly turned their vivid, living faces to the camera.

Toronto has gamely disguised itself as everyplace else and occasionally, diffidently consented to play itself. (“Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” is a notable recent example). Los Angeles and New York, the American movie capitals, supply inexhaustible and diverse locations, gritty cop pictures and glittering comedies gravitating toward the East Coast, moody films noirs and sun-bleached sexcapades belonging to California. Everybody recognizes the Hollywood sign and the Empire State Building, the Santa Monica Pier and the Brooklyn Bridge.

But Paris is special. Its uniquely dense weave of narrow streets and broad boulevards — concentric rings reflecting state-of-the-art mid-19th-century urban planning superimposed on a medieval core, with barely a right angle or parallel line in sight — discloses an apparently limitless reservoir of perspectives and moods. The sun setting over the Seine; the swirl of traffic around the Place de la Concorde; the workaday neighborhoods on the eastern fringe of the Right Bank; the storied cafes and restaurants clustered around the Boulevard St.-Germain. Love, sophistication, eroticism, danger, class struggle, violence, tenderness, political intrigue — 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 play of traffic, buildings and sky that inflect the city’s bustling waking hours is splendidly palpable in “The Red Balloon,” Albert Lamorisse’s ageless children’s film; it is all still there, and yet somehow captured for the first time, in Hou Hsaio-hsien’s “Flight of the Red Balloon” made more than 50 years after Lamorisse’s film and in homage to it.

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