Description
This first book on the director of The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia is comprehensive, analyzing each of Jonathan Demme’s thirteen films.Demme received the 1980 New York Film Critics Award as Best Director for Melvin and Howard. Subsequent Demme films such as Something Wild and the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense, which won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Documentary, made Demme a cult favorite in the league of Roger Corman.With 199l’s The Silence of the Lambs, Demme moved into a different league. The top-grossing film of the year, Silence won five Academy Awards, becoming the first film to sweep the Best Director, Actor, Actress, and Picture categories since 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Philadelphia also has been a top-grossing film, with Tom Hanks winning 1994’s Best Actor Oscar.Michael Bliss and Christina Banks include a wealth of biographical and critical data; an exclusive interview with Demme; the only on-set report on the filming of The Silence of the Lambs; an interview with Craig McKay, Demme’s Emmy-winning film editor; a bibliography; and a Demme filmography. Many of the book’s movie still illustrations have never been published.
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This superb study by Michael Bliss and Christina Banks is the first book-length work to critically address the films of Jonathan Demme, from his first major work in 1974, Caged Heat, to his most recent, Philadelphia. In tracing the themes and techniques that Demme has developed and perfected through two decades, Bliss and Banks point out the distinctive qualities of a Demme film: his sensitive and sympathetic treatment of characters; his use of wry humor, which aids his audience in appreciating human shortcomings; and his sense of joy in the filmmaking process.A graduate of what might be called the Roger Corman School of Filmmaking, Demme quickly managed to outgrow his exploitation film background and establish himself as a director whose concerns for humanistic issues, use of the newest and finest strains in contemporary music, and fascination with darker subjects in the midst of an often comic vision mark him as an impressive cinematic force.Demme is more interested in interpersonal relations and feelings than in deeds, an attitude complemented by his focus on issues of sexual equality and justice. Allowing for the kinds of fictional conclusions involving renewal and hope that exemplify the true mythos of comedy, Demme's films exemplify a statement that occurs in both Something Wild and Married to the Mob: "What goes around comes around."
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