Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is not the sort to shy away from the absurd, the savage, or the perverse. He’s directed two Oscar-winning films—The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023)—without, it seems, losing his penchant for messing with his viewers’ heads, an inclination best evidenced in 2009’s unsparing Dogtooth. “I love to be in a position where I’m trying to figure out what I am supposed to feel,” he said in 2018, “or if what I’m feeling is appropriate or not.”
His 2024 outing Kinds of Kindness saw him return to his brand of stark, harsh brutality. The film’s three segments—featuring a recurring cast including Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, and Willem Dafoe—unfurl a series of unsettling scenarios: in one, a man takes drastic measures to placate his boss’s outsized demands; another sees a husband reunited with his missing wife, only to find her a changed person; while a third concerns a pair of cultists hunting down a woman capable of resurrecting the dead.
They’re stories that emerged, Lanthimos explained, in ways that were “instinctive,” offering oblique themes of faith and control. Just as enigmatic were the photographs the director shot during production, while filming onsite in New Orleans, capturing less behind-the-scenes antics than the brooding, deadpan mood of the movie.
Yorgos Lanthimos, from i shall sing these songs beautifully (Mack, 2024). Courtesy of the artist and Mack.
These never-before-seen images have been compiled in i shall sing these songs beautifully, a new hardback book published by Mack. Across its pages are spread color and black-and-white photographs of landscapes, still lifes, trees, and, bizarrely, portraits of people from the back. Viewers of Kinds of Kindness will also identify familiar totems—the sterile bedroom of Dafoe’s cult leader, a massive painting of a fox hunt, an empty swimming pool.
Yorgos Lanthimos, from i shall sing these songs beautifully (Mack, 2024). Courtesy of the artist and Mack.
“Unlike most books on cinema, this volume is not a piece of memorabilia predicated on likenesses of the famous cast, referencing recognizable scenes in the form of film stills,” publisher Michael Mack told Deadline. “Yorgos’s photographs utilize the cast and set locations subtly, drawing upon his distinctive visual language to build an entirely new story which emerges through the particular challenges and limitations of a book sequence.”
Yorgos Lanthimos, from i shall sing these songs beautifully (Mack, 2024). Courtesy of the artist and Mack.
Indeed, the director’s particular aesthetic is on view throughout I shall sing. His raw, unfiltered lens manages to imbue visual interest—if not a portentous aura—into objects as mundane as a tree on a suburban street, a ceiling crowded with balloons, or a pair of legs as seen under a car door (an image that brings to mind the work of Surrealist photographer Guy Boudin).
Yorgos Lanthimos, from i shall sing these songs beautifully (Mack, 2024). Courtesy of the artist and Mack.
Typically cryptic, Lanthimos has not sequenced his photographs, but has accompanied them with short, mysterious texts. A sample reads like this: “he started crying again. she felt nothing. crying had become his natural state. she urged him to cry more. harder. hold nothing back. later that night he died.” Maybe they mean something to him. (The book’s title is itself a nod to Sappho.)
The release follows Lanthimos’s previous photography volume, Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken, which collected images he created during the making of Poor Things. In 2019, Lanthimos released Oviparity with Gucci, featuring his photographic work for the fashion house’s Cruise 2020 collection. The director has also photographed for magazines including Vogue and W.
i shall sing these songs beautifully is published by Mack.
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