Play

Reviews have been mixed for Jonathan Demme’s latest movie Ricki and the Flash, but the American director already has enough gems to his name to retire. Demme will be honoured by the upcoming Venice Film Festival with the Persol Tribute to Visionary Talent Award. He is also jury chairperson for the Orizzonti (Horizons) section for which the Tamil movie Visaranai (Interrogation), directed by Vetrimaran, has been selected.

A note by festival director Alberto Barbera beautifully sums up Demme’s oeuvre: “Jonathan Demme is part of that generation of cinephile auteurs who revolutionized Hollywood in the Seventies. “Colorful, exuberant, straightforward, passionate and intelligent, his cinema moves easily from studio productions to independent, fiction and documentary films, indulging his personal taste for the unexpected, for a shift in tone or genre within each individual film, which has become the original and recognizable hallmark of his style.”

A tribute by Indiewire’s video essayist Jacob T Swinney celebrates the use of the frontal close-up in Demme’s movies. The opening sequence is from his richly atmospheric The Silence of the Lambs. The list of clips includes Something Wild, Married to the Mob, Demme’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate, Philadelphia, and The Truth About Charlie. The song playing in the background, 'Goodbye Horses' by Q Lazzarus, was used in another sequence from The Silence of the Lambs, which uses a close-up of the serial killer Buffalo Bill to supremely to creepy effect.