Everybody cries in the cinema out of pity, joy or simply because you have been moved by a dramatic event, a tragic character or even by a panning shot across a landscape combined with a particular piece of music. Tears well up in a variety of forms they belong to our most tangible physical cinematic experiences. Both in film theory and other texts on the cinema, however, they remain strangely unrepresented.
Inspired by Gertrud Kochs lecture on the occasion of the opening of the new Cinema "Arsenal" in Berlin, Nach dem Film has turned its attention to the traces of tears in film and other media.
Tears can be located in a variety of contexts: when they suddenly occur in a most inappropriate setting, they become an unexpected event, peculiar to the moment. (Stauff) They produce both pleasure and embarrassment. Tears represent a certain kind of incommensurability and are spilled in both the stillness of ones own chambers (or rather in the darkness of the cinema); or they function as a tool of communication, beg a reaction and an interpretation. When the particular affliction is due to an unrequited emotion, tears fall as a means of affect regulation and bring about a restoration of an emotional equilibrium. (Decker) Or do they provide an antidote to the profound cynicism - and thus emptiness - of modern life, offering meaning and clarity? (Deterding) In crying, one loses control over ones own body, it overflows, so to speak, its borders become less clear; however simultaneously tears belong to the repertoire of the actor. Tears can be taken for a marker of sincerity, a deluge that comes from the heart, or they can be faked. For that reason they oftentimes create a distance, a detached curiosity, and the need to examine them to discover whether they are authentic or counterfeit. (Morsch) When the border between the actor and the character become unclear, it also is no longer clear whether the actor plays him or herself, or a character and who is actually doing the crying? (Streiter)
Are we onto something specific to film and the cinema, when we examine tears? Or is the filmic melodrama not instead a part of a long development in the realm of sentimental entertainment? (Kappelhoff) It seems however to be a specific feature of tears in the cinema, that they pertain to the nature of the particular status of cinematic reality. (Fliescher)
How do tears transfer themselves to the viewer from a representation to an act in the audience? Does pity stir us to tears that is, is it a mimetic event? (Döring) Do the tears of children produce a particular kind of pity? (Ott) The particular memories, which are bound up with tears, can perhaps be wakened by music. (Rahman) Oftentimes tears turn into laughter and with that one arrives at the affect produced by the academic pursuit of film studies itself. (Schlüpmann) Tears in the cinema seem to not be an isolated event, but rather may be reproduced at will, when one chooses to watch a particular film, over and over. (real-life experiences with tears in Tear Watch)
One may observe how the physical phenomenon of crying has found a place in diverse discourses, taking the form of the rational, in the texts which have been collected here. Oftentimes there are similarities between types of tears oftentimes there prove to be radical differences. For example, the reports of the viewers represented here in the Tearwatch section, tears find a different representation than they do in the more academic texts collected in this issue. It remains an open question, whether the flow of tears may be halted, fixed and examined? Or does crying become so intangible as to refuse its representation discursively, to only appear fleetingly in textual form?
We look forward to comments on these texts and further contributions to the relation of your experiences with tears in the cinema (tearwatch@nachdemfilm.de) !
Nach dem Film introduces a new feature with this issue: current texts on the topics of past issues have been introduced here in the Addendum section and will be listed both on the home page and in a addenda table of contents.
Christine Hanke on behalf of the editorial board
(Translation: Robin Curtis)
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