Yorgos Lanthimos turns his lens to images in first exhibition

It’s, by now, a well known undeniable fact that Yorgos Lanthimos’ movies usually are not for the faint of coronary heart. Delighting within the unusual and absurd, he first made a reputation for himself with Dogtooth (2009): a movie during which a domineering father imprisons his three grownup youngsters in a fenced compound, reduce off from the skin. If Poor Issues (2023) was a Victorian sadomodernist twist on the ‘Born Attractive Yesterday’ trope, his newest, Sorts of Kindness (2024), presents up a spectacle of cruelty – that includes, amongst different kinds of evil, brainwashing intercourse cults, homicide, rape, home violence, and cannibalism. In Lanthimos’ worlds, humanity is stripped of ethical pretension; his characters obey inscrutable logics, inflicting Haneke-like violence with malevolent glee.

Given the content material of those movies, it would then appear an odd selection to explain the behind-the-scenes stills from these productions as stunning. However two books, Pricey God, the Parthenon continues to be damaged (2024) – shot in the course of the filming of Poor Issues – and i shall sing these songs superbly (2024) – made alongside Sorts of Kindness – show in any other case. Now, an exhibition at Webber Gallery in Los Angeles collates photos from each books within the first public displays of Lanthimos’ images.

Whereas his movies use visceral grotesquery to unsettle, his images adopts a radically completely different technique: certainly one of absence and suggestion. An empty pool – acquainted to those that’ve seen Sorts of Kindness – is bathed in afternoon gentle; a desolate film-set city with buildings clad in scaffolding. Drawing from Sappho’s surviving fragments, Lanthimos’ pictures, of their stillness, tackle a lifetime of their very own: self-contained locations, uncanny and unresolved, that ask the viewer to take a seat with their strangeness.

A lot was product of Poor Issues set design on the time of its launch: conjuring a world that’s without delay extravagant, delirious, and pieced collectively like a dream hoarded in Bella’s thoughts. Lanthimos, chasing the uncanny gloss of Previous Hollywood, shot on a studio lot, the place painted backdrops stood in for sky and horizon. In Budapest, 4 huge, Escher-esque units sprawled throughout large soundstages to create London and Lisbon. In Lanthimos’ pictures, we see the making of Bella’s universe; a cherry picker in opposition to a blazing amber sea, Jerrod Carmichael (who performs a noble thinker within the movie, introducing Bella to concepts of socialism and existentialism) leaning in opposition to the cruise ship’s railings. Pictures of limp legs, limbs, and obscured faces channel Kubrick’s penchant for the eerie, utilizing our bodies as objects suspended between life and artifice. In contrast to the managed chaos of his movies, these photos seize one thing quieter – a second between motion and inaction, between efficiency and actuality.

There may be, nonetheless, a unique story at play on the Sorts of Kindness units. Lanthimos’ eye lingers on the in-between areas right here: vacant rooms that when held spectacle and the detritus left within the wake of storytelling. It’s a brand new form of world-building – not the feverish extra of Poor Issues, however one thing extra ghostly and forensic. What does it imply to make a world inside a world, then, solely to desert it? In Lanthimos’ movies, phantasm is heightened to the purpose of absurdity. But his images strips that deception naked, inviting us to think about what he has discarded: the melancholy of a half-built dream.

Yorgos Lanthimos: Images is on from 29 March till 24 Could 2025 at Webber Gallery LA, webberrepresents.com