At the center of this cultural-historical investigation is the film melodrama. Its leading concept is the tearful bliss, the ‘sentimental enjoyment’ inside the dark space of the cinema. Contrary to the common idea, this study does not understand the sentimental enjoyment as a degradation of a higher aesthetic feeling, but as the core of a cultural practice: namely, the aesthetic exercise of internalization. In a direct line, the modern film melodrama – still the blueprint of most successful Hollywood productions today – is developed from the founding period of the bourgeois soul: From the 18th century sentimental drama. Readings of the aesthetic concepts of Rousseau, Lessing, Diderot, or Hegel, as well as their overlapping with film-analytical sketches, culture-theoretical and media-historical reflections on entertainment cinema, contours an oscillating mosaic of different, but related concepts of the ‘education’ of the bourgeois soul: The staging of a sensuous, affective relation to the self inside the black box that is the cinema, emerges as the matrix of modern sensitivity. This thesis becomes tangible in the analyses of classical Hollywood-melodramas by directors such as Rouben Mamoulian, Josef von Sternberg, George Cukor, William Wyler, and George Stevens – or of contemporary blockbusters such as A.I. by Steven Spielberg and TITANIC by James Cameron. Last but not least, this study provides its very own theory of cinema.