The Emotion of the Cinema

To this day, I can remember the first time my parents took me to the movies. The actual film escapes me, but the experience will last with me forever. I sat down in larger than life arena, at least that from a child’s eyes. The lights dimmed, the sounds quieted, and the movie began. As a child this new experience would have normally scared me, because like most children I was afraid of the dark. However before I had the chance to fear anything, the wall came alive with images and music, transporting me from that movie theater to a world that from then would hold my attention. For me, the cinema wasn’t so much the film themselves but the experience and emotions that it had drawn from me.

Melancholia began as exactly that for me, an experience. The revealing of the plot and artistic portrayal of the characters within the first five minutes played on my emotions, dropping me into an empathetic depression, which I felt from then on. However, there was a serene moment within the film proper that caused me to question my sadness, and my connection with Claire’s panic of inevitable doom. Claire is standing on her front porch, isolated from the world, except for the white light of the moon and the haunting blue of Melancholia. The sundial garden lays in front of her, shadows of the cone-shaped trees spread symmetrical on the soft green floor. She stands there, holding herself just watching as the two shining orbs hang in the air. They are like eyes in the night sky looking back into Claire, looking back at us. For just a moment my depression is lifted, with no sound reason.

This serene moment cast me to think about the cinema as a whole. The melancholy of the movie can be seen as an end to the cinema as we know it, as Susan Sontag or Geoffrey Chesire saw it. Although these critics may see this as a negative, I heavily disagree and this movie reminded me why. My opinion and the opinion of my colleagues, some of which are artists, is that art at its basis is the evocation of emotion, regardless of what that emotion may be. Throughout the entirety of Melancholia I felt a deep overwhelming depression, which could easily be explained by the inevitable doom of the planet. But it was when I felt this serene moment of both subtle beauty and quiet sound. This is where cinema as an art is headed. It is not the depressing doom of what we have lived with and known our whole lives. Rather, the cinema is the subtle change of emotion within the viewer that can find no rhyme or reason. Claire’s represents our fear of what is coming, our fear of this change. She holds herself, looking out at the supposed destruction of all she knows. However, even her overwhelming panic seems calm at this moment. For that is the power of cinema, especially the nowadays. The power to make us feel, see, and hear things we could never otherwise know. Yes, we can argue that the movies have always done this, and to some it was better with Classic Hollywood. However, newer cinema uses these same techniques, even with newer technology, to evoke emotion within an even more vast community.

No longer does one have to go to the movie theater to experience the cinema, although I will be the first to admit that everyone should still go when they get the chance. Instead, you can watch a movie wherever one finds themselves, with people watching more movies than they have ever done before. And with that cinema has had to evolve, capturing our attention in seconds by the most trivial things, whether they be a repetitive sequence of sounds, flashing images, or impossible setting. Even we as a society have become more visual, wanting, wishing, waiting for something we haven’t seen, yet the whole time worrying if it will live up to how we once saw things. Newness has always been confused with destruction, and like Claire, we panic and fear what we see as an impending doom of what we believed as the best. But it is at these moments when we stop and look out at what is to come, that we can see that the new does not have to be feared. These emotions are still conveyed, however in more rapid and extremes. And that is what cinema will always be, an emotion and an experience. That will never change.