(In Control, meanwhile, a young Curtis is seen shirtless in front of his bedroom mirror, practicing his dance moves to Bowie’s “The Jean Genie.”) That Curtis could seemingly feel so much, so deeply, while remaining so impassive, is key to his enduring appeal: he’s a vast blank canvas, eternally relatable and projectable. If the role of a lead singer is to assume a sexual, psychological, or political position, embodying the slant of the song, Curtis - expressionless, his eyes hooded - withholds all clues. But every time the broadcast cuts to a close-up, his face is completely blank. In this early television appearance, Curtis looks, in the midst of his uniquely spastic dance moves, like he’s having fun. tour), his presence a denial of exchange with his audience: His art, in a sense, was refusal (his suicide came on the eve of the band’s first U.S.
#24 HR PARTY PEOPLE CONTROL IAN CURTIS MOVIE#
This anything-but-bizarre love triangle, more than the arc of Curtis’s musical career, gives the movie its shape.īut Curtis has always been most compelling as an enigma. The film focuses on the Curtis marriage, with Ian (Sam Reilly) balking at the crushing bust-town domesticity of his marriage to Deborah (Samantha Morton), and carrying out a guilt-laden affair with Belgian fan/journalist Annik de Honoré (Alexandria Maria Lara). Not to begrudge her catharsis, but a film that humanizes Ian Curtis, as Control avowedly intends to do, stands in fundamental opposition to the nature of his art. And in that way I suppose it was a kind of release.” It really was like watching someone else.
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(The title of her memoir comes from a lyric in her husband’s song “Transmission.”) In a recent interview with Dennis Lim of the New York Times, Curtis allowed that, watching certain scenes, she “felt emotional, not for me, but for the characters in the movie.
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It must, of course, be hard to be Deborah Curtis: your Unknown Pleasures t-shirt is the man she married as a teenager and the father of her daughter. The problem with this approach is that it’s nearly impossible to think of a subject for whom this behind-the-music treatment is less germane. Filmed in and around many of the Manchester-vicinity locations where Curtis lived, Control attempts to bring Curtis out from the long shadow of his own myth - to reveal the man behind the music.
#24 HR PARTY PEOPLE CONTROL IAN CURTIS TV#
The video was made by Anton Corbijn, a Dutch photographer who had known and documented the band in the late 70s Corbijn has now directed Control, a feature film treatment of Curtis’s life, drawn heavily from Touching from a Distance, the memoir of his widow Deborah.(The screenplay is by Brit TV scribe Matt Greenhalgh.) It’s shot by Martin Ruhe in black and whites redolent of Joy Division’s stark legacy, but is in all other ways lacking in the expressive leaps that characterize Corbijn’s “Atmosphere” video, and his other photographs of the band. The atmosphere is heavy with moral absolutes, with the polar opposition of darkness and light that characterizes Joy Division’s elemental post-punk, and the looming presence of Curtis. The solemn tone of the video’s black and white photography suggests the dirgelike pull of the song, and permits the almost Bergmanesque frankness of the symbolism. When, in his powders-and-pills collage of a Manchester valentine 24 Hour Party People, Michael Winterbottom wanted to memorialize Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, he inserted the video for the band’s “Atmosphere,” made in 1988, eight years after Curtis’s suicide at age 23. And, I––yeah, like so many others––felt I could relate.
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All I knew was that his alienation seemed impossibly close and more earnest than any music I had ever heard. I feel fortunate to have experienced the urgency, foreboding and perfection of this album… having never seen the name “Ian Curtis” outside of the liners. I will say this: Unknown Pleasures was the second CD I owned, having been improbably drawn in by only the bandname and cover.