I just saw Anton Corbijn’s film Control, a biopic of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis.
I’ve been thinking about the similarities and difference between this film and Marie Antoinette. Both films have this very immerisve and personal aesthetic and both explore the life of mythical/legendary figures.
It is an interesting difference that Sofia Coppola was criticized for making a film about French history, something that is so far removed from her position as an American who grew up in Hollywood. The film looks back a couple of hundred years at a story that’s been told over and over. Conversely, Control was made by the people close to Ian. Debrorah Curtis was co-producer, and the film was based on her book “Touching From a Distance.” Director Anton Corbijn was a photographer of the bands in the 1970s. Furthermore, co-producer Tony Wilson, founder of Factory records, gave Joy Division their TV break and invested much of his own money into the band. These people, who knew Ian so personally, had around twenty years to allow Ian’s suicide to ressonate before setting out to make this film.
In terms of Jacques Ranciere’s “aesthetic regime of the arts”, I think it is interesting to think of these films in contrast. He says:
the aesthetic regime of the arts is first of all a new regime for relating to the past. (25)
(the aesthetic regime of the arts) traces, in order either to exalt or deplore it, a simple line of transition or rupture between the old and the new, the representative and the non-representative or the anti-representative. (24)
Marie Antoinette perhaps explores the line of rupture between the old and the new in the way it separates the two. The film is aware of its own reconstruction of the past from the view, and using the technology, of the present. This is predominantly through the use of anachronistic music.
Conversely, Control explores the line of transition between the old and the new. As I said, we see this in that the people who made the film were living when Ian Curtis was, and actually knew him. Also, the smoke of his ashes rising into the sky at the end of the film could be seen as symbolising Ian’s lingering presence. The credits then role with The Killers’ cover of the song Shadowplay. So Ian Curtis is still here and impacting on today’s world in many ways. The film then repesents a smooth change from old to new rather than pointing to difference (as in MA).
Interesting article here by Natalie Curtis, Ian’s daughter who was on the set of Control.
“Bleak portrait of a tortured soul.”
Review by Peter Bradshaw
Official movie website: Control
What does 1970s Punk (in Britain) look/feel like?
Can it be thought of as a “regime“?
The film is shot in black and white monochrome, producing the same look as Corbijn’s original photographs.
The aesthetic is dull and bleak.
Corbijn says in this Q&A on you tube “…its black and white, it not very fast, its about the 70s..”
Control also presents an alternative way of thinking about sound and Deluze/Guattari’s territorialization and deterritorialization. The way sound takes over from the image and deterritorializes was explored in relation to Marie Antoinette. The music in Control perhaps has the function of “creating territories.” The soundtrack (which is mostly diegetic and in sync with the image on screen) consists of largely Joy Division music, along with the Sex Pistols, David Bowie, Lou Reed etc.. that inform Curtis’ influences. It works to create the territory of 1970s Britain. Music that was created in that time, it response to what was going on and by the characters in the film really reinforces this sense of recognisable environment. (I should probably note that the Joy Division music in the film was actually played by the actors themeselves, not JD records. I think this adds another level of authenticity though because it might have seemed a bit strange for Sam Riley to be lip syncing Ian Curtis)
