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. (For further details on that film read my review at The House Next Door.)

By combining documentary footage from gigs, talking head interviews, shots of Manchester from the era juxtaposed with present-day imagery, archival materials from notebooks to newspapers, words flashing across the screen, even quotes from Deborah Curtis’ book Touching from a Distance, Gee exhaustively sifts through information like a detective, teasing out clues to the soul of the band and its lead singer Ian Curtis who hung himself right before the scheduled American tour. The actual songs of Joy Division (and its prior incarnation Warsaw) drift in and out, hover above the movie, mirroring the spiritual aspect of the band – the total understanding of which remains elusive, forever out of reach of mortal comprehension. Gee seems to be digging madly, touching from a distance, getting as close as humanly possible. This is admirable filmmaking, full of heart and soul.

For Joy Division was Manchester’s soundscape, one of the shining lights of the punk rock renaissance that emerged from post-war no-man’s land. Talking heads from journalists to music producers describe the bands gigs as shamanistic experiences; surviving members Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook, who went on to form New Order, repeat sentiments of everything just coming together as if preordained. They just “knew” from the very moment they christened their ensemble after the supposed Nazi sex slave barracks. Joy Division evolved from an inexplicable visionary artistry more than from anything else, synthesizing goth and punk and anticipating rave.

And there was no better prophet than Ian Curtis, the tall and lanky, translucent-eyed lead singer whose herky-jerky, puppet-on-a-string dance movements resembled an epileptic fit – and this was before he’d had his first seizure, though his diagnosis with epilepsy occurred soon after he wrote “She’s Lost Control,” inspired by an epileptic girl he had helped at his social services day job, and who later died of an epileptic fit. Preordained. The irony that epilepsy is a disease in which the sufferer seems “possessed,” and that Curtis was always possessed when he went onstage is not lost on anyone, most of all not on his Belgian journalist mistress Annik Honore.

“Ian was pulled into a trance” when performing, Honore explains. Like he was “plugged into a huge electrical voltage” is how artist Genesis P-Orridge describes Curtis, while another scenester offers the analogy of a “performance artist who cuts and bleeds.” This is some heavy shit, the weight of which can be heard in Joy Division’s complicated, densely layered sound, which can be navigated only through Curtis’ deep vocals. From the band members and their d.j. manager Rob Gretton, to the producers and the venue owners, to the journalists and audiences – Joy Division was always more than the sum of its parts, the rallying call of renewal for Manchester, a city whose sewer system was in the midst of collapse, whose children were raised on the concrete streets (Peter Hook reminisces that he’d never even seen a tree until he was about nine). By narrowing the focus solely to Curtis and the band in Control, Corbijn misses Joy Division by a mile.

But by interviewing all the players, knowing precisely which questions to ask, Gee hits the heart. What Corbijn didn’t understand is that Joy Division were intertwined not with a random, industrial post-war city but with a living, breathing, specific Manchester. His sensual kitchen sink imagery in Control is beautiful to look at but as empty as those abandoned housing projects. Joy Division was the flower blossoming through the crack in the sidewalk, reflected in everything from those stark album covers to Curtis’ love of Burroughs and his evocations of industrial wastelands (both real and of the mind). In Joy Division, a member even notes that the band expanded punk by declaring that it’s important to say, “fuck you” – but then you need to move beyond and say more (though I’d argue it was The Clash at the forefront of this movement). This too was lost on Corbijn. You can’t capture a poet like Curtis in a biopic if you focus directly on the poet, as he’ll forever elude you – just like you don’t look directly at a solar eclipse, but at that in which it is reflected. Gee doesn’t take Corbijn’s literal direct approach but focuses on the margins surrounding the band, where Joy Division is being reflected, which is a brilliant idea.

Which also mirrors the brilliance of Joy Division’s approach to music. In his lyrics Curtis always referenced the great authors he devoured like Dostoevsky and Kafka so the songs could work on several levels, from the intellectual to the populist. If you want to be enlightened to grand ideas, Joy Division’s your band. If you want to dance to kick-ass raw energy in the form of a tune, listen no further than Joy Division. Towards the end of his life the singer felt the songs were writing themselves, Honore discloses. It was almost as if his artist’s soul was consuming his physical body. Everything was fated, from Curtis’ start as a social services worker (absorbing everyone else’s pain along with his own – including the wife and baby and the girlfriend on the side – is it any wonder “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was such a hit?) to the last album “Closer.” His lyrics read like a bible of his life.

And it’s this “bible” that still haunts the remaining members. How could they not have foreseen Curtis’ suicide? Why didn’t they try to save him? More than a quarter century on it’s near impossible for Gee to get his subjects to open up, all still struggling with the road not taken. So it’s eloquent that he concludes Joy Division on a note of legacy rather than on one of regret, poignantly overlaying images of New Order’s Sumner performing a Joy Division tune alternated with images of Curtis interpreting the same song. It just makes gorgeous sense, including the idea of what a producer describes as the “merchandizing of memory” since Joy Division subsequently became bigger than its actual small output, larger than the sum of its parts. Towards the end of the film when New Order’s music segues into “Atmosphere” over images of modern day Manchester the result is spine-tingling – Curtis’ embodiment of beauty from waste, daisies from pavement, art from pain must be carried on! Joy Division was bigger than one man, even bigger than its rise and fall and rebirth as New Order, paralleling Manchester’s own path. No, Gee might not have Corbijn’s visual chops, but then substance is always more than the sum of visible tangible parts.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributor: Lauren Wissot