The Thinking Machine #93

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

Two films that Tilda Swinton starred in, 35 years apart, declare striking affinities. In Peter Wollen’s Friendship’s Death (1987), she plays an alien robot plunked down in the midst of the ‘Black September’ conflict of 1970. In George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022), she is a narratologist faced with a magical Djinn. Two ‘hotel dramas’ of the encounter of human and non-human figures, both set in the Middle East. What else do they share?