The Thinking Machine #67

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

Filmmakers and cultural commentators have known it for a long time: what happens inside a car offers a microcosm of the relations within a society. The relations of gender, age, family, power, status, speech, touch and silence. This is especially so when a woman wants to drive that car – or even just wants to get her hand on its gear stick. Between a current TV series from Italy, The Lying Life of Adults (based on an Elena Ferrante novel) and two classic American automobile films, Red Line 7000 (1965) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), we trace an ever-fraught shifting of gears…