Cinema and Tears


What is it that enables the human being to cry? Beauty? Love? Poison? It is often an emotional response to another human being who has either shown us great love or great upset and abandonment. Or it can be our own independent state of deeply entrenched melancholy. Whatever the sense is that is caught and causes us to weep, it is wholeheartedly profound and intrinsically connected to what makes us human.

You know when you haven’t shed a tear for a while? It doesn’t feel right, does it? You almost begin to feel guilty of something, as if your soul has turned stale, into a machine or extra-terrestrial being. And then you fall in love again and remember what it is to cry. You feel awoken and inspired to live and make an effort at it. You may be distraught and bedridden, but you are alive because you are experiencing a revelatory depth of emotion. The human being who cries, is, at that moment of shedding a tear, indisputably human, which is a beautiful thing. It is therefore a very special event to cry. It of course occurs in some of us more than others. But it will eventually occur in all of us, one way or another.

Cinema has the power to ignite tears. In the cinema we can cry. And we cry freely in this safe place. Nobody else has to know what we are feeling. The cinema belongs to us. Others may feel different feelings from the same film, but whatever it is that we are feeling, if we are crying, then we are alive and experiencing something magical, together. This can be interpreted as an expression and symptom of love and beauty. And it is love and beauty as experienced via the medium of cinema. Therefore, cinema is undeniably a very serious and profound art form.

Painting and music make us cry, absolutely. But nothing makes us cry like watching a spectacle full of emotional characters fighting a good fight. Nothing makes us cry like a series of images that speak of unspeakable beauty when set in cinematic motion. Nothing makes us cry quite like the cinema.


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