Jonathan Demme’s the Silence of the Lambs

This chapter focuses on Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991). The synthesis of elements that create the look and identity of a film come from a variety of talents: from the director's original conception, to the cinematographer's realisation of the same; to the production designer. In the case of The Silence of the Lambs, these three elements are in perfect harmony, producing a visual signature for the film which is highly distinctive and very specific to Demme's vision. The chapter then details the first meeting and the subsequent interviews between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling. The initial meeting between Clarice and the murderous psychiatrist Lecter is one of the great set pieces of modern cinema. While clearly adhering to the imperatives of popular cinema, the sequence is shot and acted with a rigour worthy of the ‘chamber cinema’ of the Swedish master Ingmar Bergman in his late 1960s films — and this is not the only occasion in which the more rarefied agendas of art cinema are evoked by Demme and his collaborators. Another popular sequence is a perfect concatenation of all three elements of acting, writing, and direction, in which Lecter makes his devastating (and cruel) character analysis of Clarice. The chapter also explores the horror film credentials and accoutrements of the film.