Sometimes we get emotional. Whether we are a child or an adult, boy or girl, emotion sets the pace of our lives and can even seize us without warning. What does it mean to be moved? What does move us? What happens when we are moved? What good can it do?

If we take a few moments to look up the etymology of the word, always a particularly interesting exercise, here’s what we discover: emotion comes from Latin, motio: movement. What does emotion, this inner, intimate disorder, have to do with the idea of movement and action?

Emotion is what sets us in motion, what makes us move. It is the inner turmoil that forces us to emerge from ourselves, to the exterior, to encounter the world and others.
Inevitably life causes us to face unexpected events that provoke small or large reactions: separations, reunions, complicities, sorrows, love at first sight… To start a day is to take the risk of being moved. Emotion prevents us from remaining comfortably installed in the universe that we know and that reassures us. It makes us take the immense risk of changing.

Sarah Moon – La Lionne du Kenya

Emotions also arise from encountering works of art. Who has never shuddered, laughed out loud, burst into tears in front of a story, a film, a song? What an astonishing experience to find oneself overwhelmed in front of musical notes, colours, images!
In a beautiful book which relates the story of a child deeply marked by the vision of the film Nanouk the Eskimo, Florence Seyvos writes: «Imagine you are outside with someone and it is raining. You are both wet. You are sharing the rain. It’s not the same raindrops that touched you which touched the other person. Do you know what I mean? (…) In the evening, when I went to bed, I thought about the film, in its box, under my bed. I felt as if I saw thousands of invisible wires connecting the film, under my bed, in different places on Earth. In my head the wires became luminous, they shimmered. They went all the way to America, all the way to Japan, all the way to the far North. Yet, in the darkness of my room, a few centimeters from my head, it was still my film.»

The emotion we feel in front of a work of art is at the same time entirely individual, intimate, and secret but at the same time shared with others. To read Little Red Riding Hood is to be afraid of the wolf, like thousands of children before us, to have this extraordinary experience of discovering an emotion as if it were the very first time, as if we were the first to tremble, cry, laugh, as if the emotion belonged entirely to us, yet knowing that this emotion is shared universally and experienced by everyone.
Going to the cinema is also rather like that. In a silent community, in the dark, sharing emotions together.

Something mysterious circulates between works of art and us when we study them. When we come into contact with them something in us changes. Why does it change? What is at stake here?

The first element to the answer is probably to be found in the characters that, in these works, we have come face to face with. Their bodies, their gestures, their faces make us relate to ourselves. During our encounter with the characters, we project ourselves into them. This is what we call identification, the fact of becoming for a moment this person we are looking at. His adventures, whether they are summed up in an image (on a painting, an engraving or a photograph…) or whether they last the length of the story (literature, theatre, cinema…), are a way for us to see the world in a new light. Through them, a thousand lives are offered to us, a thousand points of view that suddenly open up, a thousand ways of speaking, moving, thinking, living. To be in front of a character is to become that character, to become a mother, a father, a young child, a journalist, a soldier, a doctor, a monster. It’s to become someone else for a few moments.

Through identification, there are many opportunities to discover and tame the emotions that run through us and sometimes overwhelm us, and also the possibility of understanding others. To be moved by a film or a visual work is to move towards others, to open up, to understand the world around us. It’s to develop this wonderful capacity that we all carry within us which is called empathy. Empathy that allows me to put myself in the other person’s place, to be sad when I see someone sad, to laugh because someone is laughing in front of me.

Sarah Moon – Villandry

We must equally consider: if the emotions we feel are directly linked to our ability to project ourselves into the heart of a work through the characters that we love or hate, they also arise thanks to the very form of this work.
According to the way a fall is shown in the cinema, its rhythm, the distance at which it is shown to us, we can laugh or cry about it. An assembly of lines, colours, materials, rhythms, sounds, movements… a work is always sensitive material constructed in such a way as to provoke in the spectator a sensation, a singular emotion. Stories certainly move us, but we can also be touched by purely aesthetic emotions such as beauty or ugliness for example. In the same way as with music, we can be moved to tears by notes, in cinema we can be moved by the manner of filming, a frame, and the speed of a camera movement.

Whether the work is figurative or abstract, emotion is always there, lurking behind the particular vibrancy of a blue monochrome or behind a seascape. Emotion is the invisible thread that connects us to people and objects and makes us not only isolated individuals but also a humanity sharing a common world.