In the immediate post-punk years, Joy Division were part of an emerging new-wave strain of music sometimes known as "industrial" rock, whose leading lights also included Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and the American band Pere Ubu. Indeed, in an earlier era, Ian Curtis would have been played by the young Tom Courtenay rather than Sam Riley, the newcomer who takes the role in Control.
In it, Curtis was a serious, somewhat scary presence, at odds with the otherwise genial, amused tone but this time, if Corbijn's distinctive monochrome rock photography is anything to go by (he created The Joshua Tree image for U2), the film is shot in stark black and white, in keeping with both the mood of the band's music, the sense of alienation in Curtis's lyrics and the bleak Northern backdrop of 1970s England, which in those pre-Playstation, pre-internet, pre-postmodern times still had the dour post-war tone of the kitchen-sink dramas of the 1960s. This week, the photographer Anton Corbijn's film about the late Joy Division frontman, Control: The Ian Curtis Film, will be premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on the 27th anniversary of the singer's suicide.Ĭo-produced by his former label boss Tony Wilson and the singer's widow Deborah Curtis, with a screenplay based on her account of their life together, Touching From A Distance, it represents the most comprehensive attempt so far to provide some insight into the troubled life of a gifted young man who has become an icon for successive generations of fans.Īlready the subject of several biographies and a bottomless well of internet sites, forums and message boards, this is the second time in recent years that Curtis and Joy Division have been featured in a movie - although this one is likely to be rather more sombre than Michael Winterbottom's Tony Wilson biopic, 24 Hour Party People, a light-hearted romp through two decades of the Manchester music scene.
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