Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is not the type to shy away from the absurd, the wild or the perverse. He has directed two Academy Award-winning films:The favorite (2018) and Poor things (2023) – without, it seems, having lost his penchant for messing with his audience’s heads, a penchant best demonstrated in 2009’s Unsparing Dog tooth. “I love being in a position where I’m trying to figure out what I’m supposed to feel,” he said in 2018, “or whether what I’m feeling is appropriate or not.”

His trip in 2024 Types of kindness saw him return to his brand of rugged, hard brutality. The film’s three sections – featuring a recurring cast including Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe – unfold a series of troubling scenarios: in one, a man takes drastic measures to appease his boss’s excessive demands; Another sees a husband reunited with his missing wife, only to find that she is a changed person. while a third is about two cultists hunting a woman capable of reviving the dead.

They are stories that, Lanthimos explained, were created “instinctively” and offered implicit themes of belief and control. Equally enigmatic were the photos the director took during production while filming on location in New Orleans, which captured less the behind-the-scenes antics than the brooding, deadpan mood of the film.

Yorgos Lanthimos, out I will sing these songs beautifully (Mack, 2024). Courtesy of the artist and Mack.

These never-before-seen images have been compiled I will sing these songs beautifullya new hardcover book by Mack. Scattered throughout the pages are color and black-and-white photographs of landscapes, still lifes, trees and, bizarrely, portraits of people from behind. Viewers of Types of kindness will also identify familiar totems – the sterile bedroom of Dafoe’s cult leader, a huge painting of a fox hunt, an empty swimming pool.

Yorgos Lanthimos, out I will sing these songs beautifully (Mack, 2024). Courtesy of the artist and Mack.

“Unlike most books about cinema, this volume is not a memorabilia based on likenesses of the famous actors and referencing recognizable scenes in the form of film stills,” publisher Michael Mack told Deadline. “Yorgos’ photographs make subtle use of the cast and settings, drawing on his distinctive visual language to create an entirely new story through the unique challenges and limitations of a book sequence.”

Yorgos Lanthimos, out I will sing these songs beautifully (Mack, 2024). Courtesy of the artist and Mack.

In fact, the director’s particular aesthetic is visible throughout I will sing. His raw, unfiltered lens manages to add visual interest – if not an ominous aura – to objects as mundane as a tree on a suburban street, a blanket full of balloons, or a pair of legs under a car door (an image that …reminiscent of the work of the surrealist photographer Guy Boudin).

Yorgos Lanthimos, out I will sing these songs beautifully (Mack, 2024). Courtesy of the artist and Mack.

In typical cryptic fashion, Lanthimos did not organize his photographs but rather provided 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 title of the book itself is a reference to Sappho.)

The publication follows Lanthimos’ previous photo book, Dear God, the Parthenon is still brokenwhich collected images he created during the making of Poor things. In 2019 Lanthimos was released Oviparity with Gucci, with his photography work for the fashion house’s Cruise 2020 collection. The director has also photographed for magazines including fashion And W.

I will sing these songs beautifully is published by Mack.