Lauren Wissot's Favorite:

JOY DIVISION (2007)



My first boyfriend when I came to NYC, the lead singer of a local goth band, introduced me to Joy Division – not the band itself, and not the music, since I was already a goth and well-aware of their songs – but the phenomenon. I was a big sound Sisters of Mercy chick who didn’t quite get it, a fan of over-the-top goth like Bauhaus, and the catchy dance beat of the band Joy Division evolved into, New Order. Joy Division itself was more like those minimalist 4AD bands – goth lite. The boyfriend was long out of my life by the time I realized my mistake. You can’t just listen to Joy Division – you have to absorb their aura. Now thanks to Grant Gee’s documentary Joy Division (written by punk rock’s tireless chronicler Jon Savage), which Surround Sounds the story of the band with the feel of Manchester through a collage of images, I understand why this is. The British director, by placing himself in the environment that birthed Joy Division, soaks in the band’s essence. This is something that Anton Corbijn, a Dutch photographer and cinematographer who shot the infamous video for “Atmosphere” (and appears in Gee’s doc), and tread the same material in his biopic Control, completely lost amidst his lush, gorgeous and painfully stark imagery. Corbijn’s certainly got more artistic talent than Gee, but less of an understanding of the band he knew as a young photojournalist. There’s just less substance in Control.

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As a friend of the Screengrab pointed out a few weeks ago when we did our Gay Pride list of great movies with homosexual symbolism and thematic content, we missed a bet by not including the innovative, daring British filmmaker Derek Jarman in our tally of the most influential gay filmmakers of the 20th century.  Always fiercely political at the same time he was deeply personal, Jarman -- who worked wonders in both experimental and narrativef formats --was not only one of the earliest and best gay directors of modern cinema, but also arguably the first true punk rock filmmaker, beating out even his countryman Alex Cox for the privelege of that title.  (See his astonishing film Jubilee for an especially choice example of Jarman's many and often contradictory tendecies blending together perfectly.)

Almost fifteen years after Jarman's death from complications related to AIDS, Sam Adams at the Museum of the Moving Image pens a thoughtful and informative appreciation of the man and his art, which even today is far more internally contradictory than many imagine:  "Sometimes fusing the personal and political, and sometimes pitting them against each other," Adams writes, "Jarman's films are animated by the interplay between past and present, accuracy and anachronism, nostalgia and protest.  They are, quite often and quite openly, at war with themselves, tied to national and  cinematic traditions and rebelling against them."  Noting the irony of Film London's Jarman Award, which aims to celebrate directors who are to their time what Jarman was to his, he notes "if there were a Derek Jarman of today, he or she might be as proccupied with shunning Jarman's influence as succumbing to it.

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When Sean Harris perfectly captured the hope and despair of Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis, twitching on the stage like a broken electrical cable, in Michael Winterbottom's brilliant 24 Hour Party People, there seemed good reason to assume that it would remain the last filmic word on Curtis and his band for quite a while. Instead, Curtis will be returning to haunt movie screens this fall in two separate projects, both of them labors of love with contributions from Curtis's surviving associates. (Curtis hanged himself in 1980, at the age of twenty-three.) Photographer Anton Corbijn makes his feature-directing debut with Control, a biopic starring Sam Riley, which opens this week; it's based on a book by Curtis's widow, Deborah. (She's played in the movie by Samantha Morton.) Meanwhile, Joy Division, a documentary directed by Grant Gee and written by Jon Savage, features a mix of performance footage, TV appearances and interviews with surviving band members. It's also got interview footage of Tony Wilson, who was played by Steve Coogan in 24 Hour Party People and who himself died last August. Curtis's death threatened to make him the official Rock and Roll Suicide figure of post-punk, a cheesy honor if ever there was one, so it's good to hear Deborah Curtis and other representatives of both films insist that their real concern is depicting the accomplishments of his life, not celebrating his means of leaving it. Even the huckster antihero of 24 Hour Party People, who was not above marketing his dead star as a martyr, finally told the camera that he wished people who never knew Curtis or saw him perform could be made to understand how much fun he was. — Phil Nugent