Tears as cinematic elements for loss and death in Bergman’s and Kieslowski’s films (1985–1997)

More than emotional signals, tears in cinema emerge from a complex of sensations – loss, fear, fatality, desire – triggering a movement toward salvation. Closely linked to nature’s elements, they are anchored in a dynamic that defies detachment to establish a communion with the other and an immersion in the world inhabited by the crying character. However, by appearing on the screen, tears produce ‘intensities’ that affect the narrative scheme by confronting the character and the viewer with an image of transformation, and by making invisible essences visually explicit. Drawing on Cristobal Escobar’s concept of the ‘intensive-image,’ Derridean spectrality, and haptic film theory, this article offers an analysis of and a theoretical contribution to the role of tears in the aesthetics of cinema – specifically in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s No End (1985) and Ingmar Bergman’s In the Presence of a Clown (1997). In both films, tears and their cinematic substitutes become spectral, liminal thresholds between life and death, transforming the image of the tormented body into a site of transcendence and communion in the face of Death and the dead.