The Silence of the Lambs (BFI Modern Classics) (BFI Film Classics)

by YvonneTasker (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $15.16

  Released in 1990, The Silence of the Lambs is one of the defining films of 20th-century American cinema. Adapted from the Thomas Harris novel and directed by Jonathan Demme, its central characters, Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter, have become contemporary icons. Jodie Foster plays Starling, a rookie FBI agent on the trail of Buffalo Bill , a serial killer who flays his victims. Anthony Hopkins plays Lecter, the psychopathic former psychiatrist whom Starling consults about Bill's identity. With its pairing of a perverse, invasive anti-hero and a questing, self-searching heroine, The Silence of the Lambs is a narrative of pursuit at several levels. In this study Yvonne Tasker explores the way the film weaves together gothic, horror and thriller conventions to generate both a distinctive variation on the cinematic portrayal of insanity and crime, and a fascinating intervention in the sexual politics of genre. She identifies the film as a key reference-point for tracking the 90s obsession with police procedure and serial killing, analyzing its key themes of reason and madness, identity and belonging, aspiration and transformation.