The Thinking Machine #84

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

Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930) and King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937) were included by Akira Kurosawa in the list of his 100 favourite films. In this audiovisual essay, we explore the convergence that a particular moment of his epic Seven Samurai (1954) establishes with the endings of those films. The focus is on how the three filmmakers concentrate on a particular female character in order to create a form of mysterious, emotional suspension that precedes a fateful decision.