The Thinking Machine #92

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

In the 1970s, a TV-watching teenage cinephile mixed up two films from Universal Studios – Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956) and Frank Tashlin’s Rock-a-bye Baby (1958) – so much, it created the certainty that Dorothy Malone starred in both. How could this be?

The Hollywood studio system was its own best auteur, and an endless generator of intertextual connections across genres (in this case, melodrama and musical comedy) and between very different works. Which makes perfect material for audiovisual essays that plumb our creative memories of cinema.