The Thinking Machine #76
The Lonesome Crowd
In their series The Thinking Machine, critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin create a new video essay for Filmkrant every month.
Two classic films from 1928: Paul Fejös’ Lonesome and King Vidor’s The Crowd. Although one unfolds in a single day and the other over a long span of time, both these stories of a romantic couple display strikingly similar settings, gestures and rituals of leisure amidst an increasingly frantic and pressured 20th century world. Together, these films afford us a look back at how the onset of modernity was processed by cinema, almost 100 years ago.