"For years, I cried, not over my own losses, but at the movies. When bad
things happened to me in real life, I didn't react. I seemed cool or
indifferent. Yet in the dark and relative safety of the movie theater, I
would weep over fictional tragedies, over someone else's tragedy."
At age nine, Madelon Sprengnether watched her father drown in the
Mississippi River. Her mother swallowed the family's grief whole and no
one spoke of the tragedy thereafter. Only years later did Sprengnether
react, and in a most unlikely place: in the theater watching the film
Pather Panchali, by Satyajit Ray.
In the fascinating memoir Crying at the Movies, Sprengnether looks at
the sublime connections between happenings in the present, troubling
events from the past, and the imagined world of movies. By examining the
films she had intense emotional reactions to throughout her adult
life--House of Cards, Solaris, Fearless, The Cement Garden,
Shadowlands, and Blue--Sprengnether finds a way to work through her
own losses, mistakes, and pain.