• An unbelievably taut and entertaining 118 minutes
  • Demme’s main aesthetic visual choice here is the close-up (close to the extreme close up eyes by like Leone in the shootout sequences of good the bad and the ugly) with actors facing the camera. He utilized this for the first time during the climax of something wild and it was stunningly effective and gorgeous there. Very few films in cinema history use the close up as often and as effective as the silence of the lambs and it aids the intensity of the scenes and performances
  • Tak Fujimoto is the DP here- he also worked with close-up aesthetic extraordinaire Tom Hooper on john adams in 2008
  • It’s a demme film so are cameos galore. We have a very small role here for Tracey Walter, one for Roger Corman, Chris Isaac
  • It’s simply one of Howard Shore’s greatest musical scores
  • Hopkins performance lives up to spot it still holds today in cinema and pop-culture. It’s an unflinching and uncompromising performance. There’s little blinking and the close-ups of Demme help tremendously. It would be impossible to duplicate this performance without that choice— his diction is just immaculate—works like “tedious” and of course popular ones like “chianti”
  • Like many great films many of the attribute seem cliché because it’s been copied so often. This has happened to goodfellas and pulp fiction as well. It’s so influential that the psychological profiling and jargon now seem worn—but we should recognize this for what it is—it’s a brilliant screenplay
  • Foster is the film’s vehicle and her performance shouldn’t be overlooked because it doesn’t quite match Hopkins. She deals with real male stare throughout the film (cops at the funeral home, with Scott Glenn, with Lector, the Dr. Chilton character).—she’s a character with grit and balls to put it bluntly and crudely—she’s intelligent, ambitious, and inherently good.
  • Shockingly high amount of close-ups. The lector encounters, the finale with night vision, Ted Levine’s buffalo bill putting on makeup through a mini-montage sequence
  • Like all demme films the music is done to perfection- not just the score by Howard Shore but the “goodbye horses” haunting scene with Levine’s dance and the “American girl” Tom Petty song introducing us to Brooke Smith’s Catherine Martin victim character. That scene tells us everything we need to know about her and creates instant sympathy
  • Much has been made of the false editing sequence switching the establishing shot of the house outside Chicago and the house (with buffalo bill) in ohio. We have the false door buzzer as well. I don’t get too moral about these things. I think it is done fairly and, more importantly, it’s wildly effective. The punch wears off after your first viewing but the admiration for the editing craftsmanship still stands (I’ve seen the film 10 times probably). It’s so well done. Another scene, the lighting during the killing of the Charles Napier cop character (gorgeous use of lighting as Hannibal strings him up outside of his little bird cage like prison cell). It’s not practical to the world of the film but it doesn’t take you completely out of it as a viewer so I’m left just admiring the gorgeous mise-en-scene and use of lighting
  • There’s detail in the mise-en-scene I’m still picking up on. They said here “he used to try and be a lot of thing”- from Hannibal and then in Bill’s house there is older, worn, nazi flyers and swastikas all over the place if you watch carefully
  • The final shooting reminds me of heat. Her skill and expertise give her a split-second edge after a bright lighting (from his mask the noise here vs pacino with the light and shadow from the jet at the airport)
  • There are intermittent uses of flashback surrealism within the sequences. Cut to her of a young girl in scene. This reminds me a little of midnight cowboy cutting to Joe Buck’s past
  • I absolutely love the “having an old friend for dinner” coda/epilogue—it’s not quite Casablanca’s last line but close
  • Masterpiece