The Thinking Machine #90
All a Film Needs is a Girl, a Guy, a Gun, a Knife, a Wheel and a Wall
In their series The Thinking Machine, critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin create a new video essay for Filmkrant every month.
The saying is legendary, and has been credited to everyone from D.W. Griffith to Jean-Luc Godard: “All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun”. That means two things: cinema is, in a primal sense, a sensational spectacle; and it is governed by the ruling ideology of gender and violence.
However, if you begin adding elements to the formula, you can also complicate its meaning. Cinema, from Tod Browning to Patrice Leconte, has long been obsessed with the carnival act of daredevil shooting and knife throwing. Women, men, knives, guns, and the motion of a wheel: many permutations, many scenarios and many moods can arise from these elements.
