“My friend, the direc­tor Jonathan Demme, passed last night,” wrote Talk­ing Heads’ David Byrne on his blog yes­ter­day. “I met Jonathan in the ‘80s when Talk­ing Heads were tour­ing a show that he would even­tu­al­ly film and turn into Stop Mak­ing Sense,” the famous — and in the minds of many, still the very best — con­cert movie. “I loved his films Melvin and Howard and Cit­i­zens Band (AKA Han­dle With Care). From those movies alone, one could sense his love of ordi­nary peo­ple. That love sur­faces and is man­i­fest over and over through­out his career.” Read just a few of the many oth­er trib­utes to Demme made so far, and you’ll encounter the same words over and over again: love, empa­thy, com­pas­sion.

Few film­mak­ers man­age to get those qual­i­ties onscreen as con­sis­tent­ly as Demme did, and even few­er do it at his lev­el of tech­ni­cal mas­tery. The two video essays here exam­ine his cin­e­mat­ic tech­nique, espe­cial­ly as seen in one of his best-known films: 1991’s Silence of the Lambs, the sec­ond in the ongo­ing series fea­tur­ing refined career can­ni­bal Han­ni­bal Lecter. The brief episode of Tony Zhou’s Every Frame a Paint­ing at the top of the post breaks down how Demme han­dles the ques­tion of who “wins” the inter­ac­tion in the first con­ver­sa­tion between Antho­ny Hop­kins’ Lecter and Jodie Fos­ter’s young FBI trainee Clarice Star­ling — two char­ac­ters who enter into this and all their sub­se­quent inter­ac­tions with their own shift­ing moti­va­tions, goals, and sen­si­tiv­i­ties.

In this and oth­er scenes through­out his career, Demme made strong and influ­en­tial use of close-up shots, to the point where Jacob T. Swin­ney could ded­i­cate a super­cut to “The Jonathan Demme Close-Up.” While “most film­mak­ers choose to employ the close-up shot dur­ing scenes of cru­cial dia­logue,” Swin­ney writes, “Demme prefers to line up his char­ac­ters in the cen­ter of the frame and have them look direct­ly into the lens of the cam­era.” And so “when Dr. Han­ni­bal Lecter hiss­es at Agent Clarice Star­ling, we feel equal­ly vic­tim­ized,” or in Philadel­phia “as Andrew Beck­ett suc­cumbs to AIDS, we feel an over­whelm­ing sen­sa­tion of sym­pa­thy. These char­ac­ters seem to be look­ing at us, and we there­fore con­nect on a deep­er lev­el.”

While Demme used his sig­na­ture close-ups and oth­er emo­tion­al­ly charged shots in all his fea­tures, from his ear­ly days work­ing for leg­endary B‑movie pro­duc­er Roger Cor­man on, he brought his human­is­tic style to his var­i­ous doc­u­men­tary and con­cert film projects as well. “Stop Mak­ing Sense was char­ac­ter dri­ven too,” writes Byrne. “Jonathan’s skill was to see the show almost as a the­atri­cal ensem­ble piece, in which the char­ac­ters and their quirks would be intro­duced to the audi­ence, and you’d get to know the band as peo­ple, each with their dis­tinct per­son­al­i­ties. They became your friends, in a sense. I was too focused on the music, the stag­ing and the light­ing to see how impor­tant his focus on char­ac­ter was — it made the movies some­thing dif­fer­ent and spe­cial.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Film­mak­ing Tech­niques of Mar­tin Scors­ese, Jack­ie Chan, and Even Michael Bay

David Byrne Plays Sev­en Char­ac­ters & Inter­views Him­self in Fun­ny Pro­mo for Stop Mak­ing Sense

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

What could movies as dif­fer­ent as Bar­ton Fink, The Big Lebows­ki, No Coun­try for Old Men, and True Grit have in com­mon? Even casu­al cinephiles will take that as a sil­ly ques­tion, know­ing full well that all of them came from the same sib­ling writ­ing-direct­ing team of Joel and Ethan Coen, bet­ter known as the Coen broth­ers. But to those who real­ly dig deep into movies, the ques­tion stands: what, aes­thet­i­cal­ly, for­mal­ly, intel­lec­tu­al­ly, or emo­tion­al­ly, does uni­fy the fil­mog­ra­phy of the Coen broth­ers? Though it boasts more than its fair share of crit­i­cal, com­mer­cial, and cult fan favorites, its auteurs seem­ing­ly pre­fer to mark their work with many sub­tle sig­na­tures rather than one bold and obvi­ous one.

Cameron Beyl, cre­ator of The Direc­tors Series (whose exam­i­na­tions of Stan­ley Kubrick and David Finch­er we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), finds out just what makes a Coen broth­ers movie a Coen broth­ers movie in his sev­en-part, near­ly four-hour set of video essays on the two Jew­ish broth­ers from the Min­neso­ta sub­urbs who went on to make per­haps the most dis­tinc­tive impact on the zeit­geist of their gen­er­a­tion of Amer­i­can film­mak­ers.

He begins with the Coen broth­ers’ Texas noir debut Blood Sim­ple and sopho­more south­west­ern slap­stick Rais­ing Ari­zona, then goes on to their larg­er-scale post­mod­ern peri­od pieces Miller’s Cross­ing, Bar­ton Fink, and the Hud­suck­er Proxy.

The next chap­ter cov­ers their break­out films of the late 1990s Far­go and The Big Lebows­ki, and then two high­ly styl­ized pic­tures, the Odyssey-inspired prison break O Broth­er, Where Art Thou? and the black-and-white noir The Man Who Was­n’t There. Then come Intol­er­a­ble Cru­el­ty and The Ladykillers, two 21st-cen­tu­ry screw­ball come­dies, fol­lowed by their “pres­ti­gious pin­na­cle,” the acclaimed four-pic­ture stretch of No Coun­try for Old Men, Burn After Read­ing, A Seri­ous Man, and True Grit.

The final chap­ter (below) looks at the Coen broth­ers’ two most recent works, both of which take on the cul­ture indus­try: Inside Llewyn Davis, the tale of a would-be 1960s folk star, and Hail, Cae­sar!, one of ear­ly-1950s Hol­ly­wood.

Beyl’s analy­sis brings to the fore both the more and the less vis­i­ble com­mon ele­ments of the Coen broth­ers’ movies. The for­mer include their fond­ness for his­tor­i­cal and “mid­dle Amer­i­can” set­tings, their repeat­ed use of actors like John Good­man, Steve Busce­mi, Frances McDor­mand, and John Tur­tur­ro, and their ten­den­cy to move the cam­era with what Beyl sev­er­al times describes as “break­neck speed.” The lat­ter include eas­i­ly miss­able place and char­ac­ter inter­con­nec­tions (for instance, how Bar­ton Fink and Hail, Cae­sar!, set a decade apart and made a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry apart, involve the same fic­tion­al Hol­ly­wood stu­dio) and their simul­ta­ne­ous deploy­ment and sub­ver­sion of genre con­ven­tions, pos­si­bly owing to their life­long “out­sider” per­spec­tive.

But above all, noth­ing sig­nals the work of the Coen broth­ers quite so clear­ly as their ever-more-refined mix­ture of zani­ness and bru­tal­i­ty, which Beyl puts in terms of their mix­ture of dis­parate film­mak­ing influ­ences: Pre­ston Sturges on one hand, for exam­ple, and Sam Peck­in­pah on the oth­er. This comes with their films’ built-in resis­tance to straight­for­ward inter­pre­ta­tion, a kind of plea­sur­able com­plex­i­ty that pre­vents any one sim­ple his­tor­i­cal, social, or polit­i­cal read­ing from mak­ing much head­way. In fact, as Beyl acknowl­edges in the first of these video essays, the Coen broth­ers would prob­a­bly con­sid­er this sort of long-form exam­i­na­tion of their work a waste of time, but if it sends view­ers back to that work — and espe­cial­ly if it sends them back watch­ing and notic­ing more close­ly — it does a favor to the rare kind of mod­ern cin­e­ma that actu­al­ly mer­its the word unique.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Coen Broth­ers Sto­ry­board­ed Blood Sim­ple Down to a Tee (1984)

Is The Big Lebows­ki a Great Noir Film? A New Way to Look at the Coen Broth­ers’ Icon­ic Movie

How the Coen Broth­ers Put Their Remark­able Stamp on the “Shot Reverse Shot,” the Fun­da­men­tal Cin­e­mat­ic Tech­nique

Tui­leries: A Short, Slight­ly Twist­ed Film by Joel and Ethan Coen

World Cin­e­ma: Joel and Ethan Coen’s Play­ful Homage to Cin­e­ma His­to­ry

Dis­cov­er the Life & Work of Stan­ley Kubrick in a Sweep­ing Three-Hour Video Essay

How Did David Finch­er Become the Kubrick of Our Time? A New Series of Video Essays Explains

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.