- Silence of the lambs author movie#
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Clarice is conflicted with Jack, seeing him as a leading officer who can advance her career, but also as a father figure. Clarice, by comparison, speaks to Crawford with a tilt of her head, oftentimes looking off to the side as she speaks. Crawford is framed from a place of aggressive directness with the camera’s point of view looking up slightly at his point-blank stare. In the close-up there are slight differences between how we are to perceive these characters. The synchronization of Starling with viewers is key to the success of Lambs and this is in part achieved through the first impression of her superior officer Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn). The Silence of the Lambs‘ feminism is tied to its narrative choices, but the density of its feminist content can also be traced to the cinematic form of longtime Demme collaborator Tak Fujimoto and the brilliance of the extreme close-up. The Silence of the Lambs is essentially about one woman trying to save another woman and the lengths she will go to push herself along the way to be the best FBI agent she can possibly be even with society at large pressing down on her at all times due to her gender.
Silence of the lambs author windows#
There’s the underground prison of Lecter’s mental institute where Clarice has a glob of semen hurled at her, the old storage locker where fog gives way to mannequins which give way to a dead body, and then there’s Bill’s seamstress playhouse where swastikas can be seen on the walls and windows are exchanged for views of dirt before finally coming upon the girl in the well.
Her various tests along the way play out like a madhouse of twisted shock and horror with the investigation leading her further down a rabbit hole into hell.
Silence of the lambs author serial#
The film uses a structure which moves up the mid-Atlantic seaboard through states like West Virginia until moving inland to finally confront serial killer Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). One of the central themes of The Silence of the Lambs is survival in the face of patriarchy’s worst evils. She’s an outcast among a sea of testosterone and has to prove herself doubly so to make it in this line of work. She’s immediately shown hopping into an elevator crowded by men who dwarf her in size and wear red to her gray. We all are to a degree, but Clarice even more so, due to her FBI training. The Silence of the Lambs, by far Demme’s most popular and enduring film, carries all those hallmarks and earns its place as one of the great American films by inundating itself with a thematic density that moves far beyond usual genre fare into something far more iconic and intellectually explosive.Ĭlarice Starling is a woman in a man’s world.
Silence of the lambs author movie#
His films have certain hallmarks such as musical, rhythmic editing and an expansiveness that bends beyond the central narrative and - to paraphrase an idea from Pauline Kael - into characters who may appear for only a moment but are presented with such body language and distinctiveness that their own movie is likely as just as interesting as that of Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) or Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) or any of his main characters. Demme isn’t so much a controlling auteur as much as he is a guiding hand for the narratives that are born out of a collaborative process. His filmmaking understood the gendered dynamics at hand due to his creative process opening itself to everyone involved in the making of the film. Demme’s movies gave women the space to be complicated, daring, unlikable, and vulnerable in equal measure.
Her statement runs parallel to the fact that most of Demme’s best films are about women, including The Silence of the Lambs, Rachel Getting Married, and Beloved, among others. Jodie Foster once remarked, “My favorite female director is Jonathan Demme,” which was her way of saying that Jonathan Demme understood women.