2023-04-17 08:59:07
Who cares if someone sniffles and sobs? Cinema and literature let us practice how to deal with certain feelings in life. A comment.
A dog understands its people in their moods. Good people also try to understand their dog.Chromorange/Imago
When the family dog dies in “When will it finally be like it never was” the man in front of me in the cinema groans. I don’t know if he was that affected by the scene himself, as the family is united in grief on screen. It may be that my sniffling bothered him and he wanted to stop me that way. To be on the safe side, I put my big scarf a bit wider around my head, as a kind of noise protection.
Who would judge that people cry in the cinema? Laughter is allowed too. In the dark room we sit in a community of strangers. There are often a few confidants, but it’s not a place where you make acquaintances. Even the most sociable type resists small talk during a film, chatter among friends is acknowledged by others with hisses or a stern sentence.
A shelter for those who feel similarly
When I saw Close, the film about a boy’s friendship and its end, I had forgotten the tissues, but luckily my daughter was at my side, who had a whole pack with her. It sobbed behind us and beside us. I say this to assure you that it’s not just animals that make me cry in the movies. And if you have the feeling, especially in a smaller hall, that the atmosphere affects everyone in a similar way, the cinema can also be a shelter. A small reality within the big reality.
When a dog dies in the cinema, I always have a glimpse of a Soviet film: White Bim Black Ear, based on a novel by Gavriil Trojepolski (known in the West as White Bim Black Ear). A writer selects from a litter of black and brown setters the only outbred breeder the breeder wanted to get rid of, a white guy with a few spots and a prominent ear. They develop a relationship that can only develop between humans and dogs: intimate and free at the same time; wordless but not mute; Confidence, trust without calculation.
A doubling of the loss
The writer in “Weißer Bim Schwarzohr” falls ill, and the dog fares badly. It’s been decades, but I still remember how sick I felt after watching this film, I was so exhausted by the grief. In childhood and adolescence, when you experience many things for the first time, emotions often dig deep. This is why, as adults, we remember the early formative reading or viewing experiences so well. Cinema and literature can, so to speak, allow us to practice how to deal with certain feelings.
A look at the archive shows me that I had seen “Weißer Bim Schwarzohr” when my first dog had already died horribly, so the shock was repeated while watching. At the time it was probably the wrong film for me, “Krambambuli” by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach the wrong reading; I was too young for the duplicity of losses.
In “When will it finally be like it never was”, the readers of Joachim Meyerhoff’s books, based on which the film was based, also know that the farewell to the dog is only the first chapter in the disintegration of a sympathetically chaotic family. Like a preparation for other bad things. And yet we all laughed a lot in the cinema. Just as I was surprisingly able to laugh again after the death of my first dog.
#dog #person #general