Yorgos Lanthimos turns his camera inward with i shall sing these songs beautifully — analogue photographs made on the set of Kinds of Kindness in New Orleans, inhabiting the space between a real location and the otherworld of cinema.
Lanthimos's filmography, lauded for its ambitious world-building and absurdist explorations of human relations, has established him as one of the most distinctive auteurs in contemporary cinema. This book draws on his renowned visual language to tell a haunting new story through photographs made during the production of his latest feature, Kinds of Kindness (2024). The images occupy an ambiguous territory — neither behind-the-scenes document nor standalone art, but something that lives in the gap between the two.
Lanthimos makes all his photography, both still and moving, on analogue film, relishing the creative intimacy the medium involves. These previously unseen colour and black-and-white images became a part of the formation of the new film's world. Here, they become fragments that elaborate an entirely new story, rich with the tensions and unsettling atmospheres that Lanthimos has made his own.
Interwoven throughout are new texts by Lanthimos which evoke the fragmented lyricism of Sappho, from whose poetry the book takes its title. The words and images do not illustrate each other so much as they orbit the same emotional centre — loss, longing, the impossibility of complete expression. Together they construct a register that feels both ancient and immediate.
i shall sing these songs beautifully is not a film companion or a portfolio. It is a separate work by an artist whose primary medium is cinema but whose eye — trained on the nuance of gesture, light, and spatial tension — produces photographs that stand on their own terms. What remains is the Lanthimos sensibility: the feeling that something has just happened, or is about to, and that the camera has arrived at precisely the right wrong moment.
