Jonathan Demme was the award-winning American filmmaker best known for his critically acclaimed and commercially successful directorial work on The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. For me, however, he was a magician. One who managed through skill alone to craft ugly stories into weirdly comforting experiences. The past tense here feels wrong, in a sense, as even though Demme passed away in April of this year, his memory lives on in his work. As with all art, what remains of Demme’s work is not persistent and unchangeable – while his films remain fixed in form, each generation gives them a new meaning and is moved in new ways by them. This is exhibited clearly in his most impacting work: The Silence of the Lambs. The film is inarguably his best-known, and one of three films in history to have won all top-five Oscar categories. For me however, the film’s most important characteristic is in Demme’s ability to find goodness in evil.
