The Thinking Machine #106

In their series The Thinking Machine, critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin create a new video essay for Filmkrant every month.

In 1982, Beverle Houston advanced the idea that at the centre of Orson Welles’ films there is the figure of the “power baby”, an anti-hero who is the “central figure of desire and contradiction”. He is rich, ambitious, fiercely individualistic; yet he is also imbued with nostalgia for his lost childhood, frustrated longings for human connection, and a deep death-drive.

The power baby exists in cinema far beyond Welles: in this essay we draw striking links between the classic Citizen Kane (1941) and Nicolas Roeg’s visionary and underrated Eureka (1983).