Begotten - best forgotten?

In 1989, E. Elias Merhige started pre-production on an experimental film that would ultimately transcend any attempts at nailing it to a specific genre but which has unmistakably provided inspiration for modern Horror directors across the Globe.

The film, which was released in 1991 after many months of laborious post production, was Begotten.

The three years from preproduction to release was due to a hand processing technique which essentially required every single frame to be re-photographed (from the original black and white reversal film) taking around ten hours per minute of film to complete. This granted the final movie an atmospheric quality similar to Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou, but unlike no other - all but the harshest blacks and whites were erased and so the film plays out and displays a world devoid of shades of grey.

Begotten is essentially a Creation myth, though one told through the medium of utmost suffering, and by the time the ending credits flicker, the viewer may find that they themselves have suffered more than enough. Begotten's biggest problem is that it is simply far too long - once past the admittedly brilliant and mind-blowingly disturbing opening sequence, the film takes a severe turn for the worse and for the most part tries the viewers patience more than it ever shocks again. But it is without a doubt the first ten minutes that will remain in the mind of anyone watching, and the reason I decided to write about the film.

The film opens on a beach, somewhere tropical - a chorus of chirping insects (which rarely lets up during the next hour and ten minutes) begins. We see a man (God) sitting in a dilapidated shack. The camera cuts away, and suddenly splashes of blood hit the wall - we return to see the man now in a death-shawl, twitching and drooling copious ammounts of black, tar-like blood into his own lap. Soon he proceeds to spasmodically disembowel himself with a straight razor, stripping away flopping chunks of flesh - his pain is palpable, and it is not over soon. Eventually, he can take no more, and dies. The horror is not over, though, as we are then treated to the body's natural process after death - defacation. Mud-like, watery shit oozes down God's exposed leg for a while, till out of this mess of blood and feces emerges a woman (Mother Earth), born of the suffering of God. She takes in her surroundings and holds her (covered) breasts to the heavens in defiance. Then she returns to God to make use of the common final act of the dying man - his bloodied but still firm erection. He ejaculates onto her belly, and wiping it off with her fingers, she inseminates herself with God's seed.
In the next scene, Mother Earth gives birth to a fully formed but overwhelmingly broken man (Son of Earth), before shuffling away to leave him to his own devices. Son of Earth's devices (from now till the end of the movie) seem to be writhing in agony and vomiting internal organs out for peculiar nomads in burlap sacks.
Unfortunately, this (and more achingly stretched out scenes of black and white suffering) takes place over the next hour and all but totally diminishes the power of what came before.

What the film achieves in it's first scene is both astonishing and disgusting, and the photography has indeed spawned modern cinematic imitations, most notably in the form of the 'Cursed Video' in the Ring/Ringu films which were filmed in a similar fashion but made more cinematically palatable with digital post-processing - Begotten's visual power stems from being so contrasting that the viewer often is not sure - and often does not want to be sure - what is happening on screen.

So it is art in execution, and it has the power to shock with its subject matter, but is it successful?
Time magazine put it among its ten most important movie releases of 1991 list, but it has divided opinions continually since, though always the major criticism remains its sheer nihilistic length.

Begotten
Not to be viewed with a weak heart or full stomach...

This Is Civilisation

Last year we had Simon Schama’s The Power of Art on the BBC; a series to be loved and treasured as it brought to life in dramatic reconstructions, alongside Schama’s wry tones, the stories and period background behind great works of artistic expression by such notable figures as Caravaggio, David, Van Gogh and Picasso. This year, Channel 4 brings us This Is Civilisation which promises to do similarly marvellous things with artist and writer Matthew Collings (who isn’t on television nearly enough) travelling around the world as our guide.

It began last night (Saturday, 24th November) with Ye Gods, the first of four episodes in which our man takes us through his own history of art beginning with the ancient Greeks and leading right through the centuries to the modern age and its various controversies. The first installment focused on the importance of religion, particularly Christianity, Islam and paganism, as a subject and inspiration, and how in turn these works influenced our world. Later episodes entitled Feelings, Save Our Souls and Uncertainty will continue to explore the role and themes of art as a civilising, symbolic and soul-enriching presence and experience in our lives through many forms.

I like Collings; I like his enthusiasm, his soft English accented delivery and ‘nothing is strange’ approach to his subject matter. He’s written some great books on art: Blimey!, about London's modern art history, It Hurts, about New York's and This Is Modern Art, which was also a cracking BBC series presented by the author.

This should be the most watchable and fascinating television series of the year.

The Tea Time of the Self

The first step to self-help is buying the book. The second step is reading the bloody thing. These things always seem a good idea at the time: the blurb on the cover speaks of the wonderful benefit people have found through the information and advice inside, while the brief feeling of optimism at the life-changing potential of the words on the pages in your hand reels you in. Even an underwhelming flick-through in the bookshop doesn’t kill much of the appeal: take this home, read it properly and improve thy self.

I have a minor history of buying these books and not reading them. I’ve purchased the odd copy, usually when I’ve been at a fairly low ebb, and admittedly there is something to be said for the initial comfort they bring through their promise alone. However, once a few paragraphs have been navigated, I do tend to get the feeling I’m being pointed out the bleedin’ obvious and not getting provided with some brilliant insight into my own being, or type of being.

I imagine my problem is that of expecting instant miracles and thus upon discovering no effortless enlightenment I'm overtaken by an 'easier-said-than-done' kind of scepticism that encourages my cynical demons to block any willingness to patiently trust and implement any of the subtle changes advised. It seems I'm too pig-headed to learn self-knowledge from anyone but myself through my own way of going through life playing things by ear. I feel the best self-help book I could read would be one that deals with the obstacle of my own stubbornness when it comes to reading self-help books. Of course, I likely wouldn’t read that either.

Anyways, I very recently bought Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. It deals with a a world of emotions and problems and how best to face up to them. True to form, I’ve barely taken in a word of it. The author of this book doesn’t know me at all; she doesn’t even have so much as a first impression of me to go on. What help can she be? How can she understand my individual needs? Yet people swear by this book; they rave about it on Amazon; it’s been good for them; probably because they’ve allowed it to be.

Audiobooks may be the thing for me. An eloquent spoken word has more power than an eloquent written word, I find. I've found and am currently downloading a torrented version of the above work in mp3 format. Hopefully any future improvements to my disposition may not be unrelated.

Sunday Song #7 "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" by Gil Scott Heron

If hip-hop really did begin with this then it peaked at the earliest possible stage. Gil Scott Heron's angry polemic from 1971 is one of music's truly seminal moments, providing a blueprint for later generations of artists good and bad to crack their knuckles over and take to some logical conclusion.

The words flowing from the mouth are succinct poetry speaking of civil rights and urban unrest, black consciousness and the banality of media, with scathing name-checks for the slippery and later discredited men in office at the time (Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew) thrown in.

It's hard to argue with the power of what's being said here, nor is it easy to resist tapping a foot and nodding to the groove that carries this whole protest message across to your freed and funky mind.

Gil Scott Heron - "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" mp3

Seduced

Yesterday I stood amongst strangers and viewed a slide show that included sexually graphic nothing-left-to-the-imagination shots of anal penetration, and I felt completely normal. This must be the difference between looking at sex in art and looking at sex in porn; the context decides everything.

It was inside the highbrow environs of the art galleries at London’s famous Barbican Centre that I found myself so blasé. Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now is a new exhibition that runs until late January 2008 with a reassuring ‘adults only’ entry limit and content sure to raise a few eyebrows and provoke some wry smiles upon being discussed or read within the cultural reviews of the Sunday supplements or on the odd television or Radio 4 programme.

As suggested above, this exhibition doesn’t flinch from the nitty-gritty with much ‘hardcore’ material on display, albeit with the key distinction being made early on that this is ART, with the purpose primarily to provoke thought and emotion rather than pornography’s sole aim to sexually arouse. I tend to agree as nothing here really aroused me at all, while there was some thought inspired, albeit in quite a whimsical sense, by the various representations of intercourse and stimulation that mostly begins, as much does, with the classical Greeks and Romans - each with their wickedly salacious sets of Gods, nymphs and satyrs honoured in marble statues and wall paintings depicting ancient nookie.

Looking to provide something for everyone the curators also include sexually infused pieces from the Renaissance age as well as Chinese, Japanese and Indian pieces, the latter informing myself that we, in the West, have been for years misinterpreting the philosophy of the Karma Sutra and wrongly attaching our own mucky ideals to it completely inappropriately.

With much of this early stuff fairly humdrum, the exhibition doesn’t really find its edge until it reaches the photographic age and that extra bit of explicit detail the camera provides. Paintings and sculpture portraying sexual acts retain an ambiguous detached-from-reality quality, but photographs mirror exactly what people get up to.

American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s pictures have the greatest shock appeal in the exhibition. There’s something about fisting that never fails to create unease within me, even in a shiny black and white shot. Sadomasochism too, has never been my bag at all, though I can appreciate Mapplethorpe’s technically excellent recordings of such acts between consenting gents in medieval dungeon gear.

Seduced has household names amongst its roster of artists: Andy Warhol gets two films, Blow Job and The Kiss running on loops; Tracey Emin pops up right at the start, while Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon are represented by a painting each. These are some of the highlights of the exhibition with a rarely-seen piece from Picasso’s wondrously melancholic blue period revealing an incongruously happy scene of oral pleasuring. Bacon’s painting, Two Figures in the Grass, while striking, doesn’t seem to be about sex at all, but rather loneliness, given that there appears to be only one figure in the work, and in some distress. Maybe I'm just looking at it all wrong.

So, sexually intercourse didn't begin in 1963 at all, and has actually been going on for ages and ages. Seduced, without being particularly enlightening, provides interesting evidence of its longevity and how it has informed so much of what we do through history. You're probably even thinking about it right now.

Eastern Promises

So David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen decided to get hitched and live happily ever after. Well, this marriage of director and actor is still young but thus far it’s produced two films that stand as the career highpoints of both men; first in 2005’s crackling A History of Violence and now this: Eastern Promises, a terrific London-set tale that delves into the chilling underworld of Russian mobsters complete with some of the most bone-crunching, uncomfortable in-your-face violence you’ll see on a screen.

Not that Eastern Promises goes out of its way to be brutal for kicks; this isn’t action entertainment, this is a depiction of a tough world where extreme unpleasantness is part and parcel of business and the camera’s eye doesn’t flinch from following it so, regardless of the teeth-gritting effect it will have on its audience. The film earns its 18 certificate within its first two minutes, and though the body count remains relatively low throughout, it’s the visceral anti-cartoon nature of the violence that leaves the sick taste in the mouth. A steam room punch-up late in the film will be spoken of in debates for decades to come, I’m sure.

How we find ourselves in this murky world is largely through the efforts of midwife Anna, whom delivers a baby from a young dying girl and is moved by the tragedy of the situation and the discovery of the girl’s diary to investigate the unfortunate circumstances without being perturbed and compromised by the very dark and very sordid alleys to which her interest leads. Something of an angel with a sadness in her eyes, Anna is played by pretty Naomi Watts, whom is even prettier with an English rose accent and such a sympathetic character so excellently portrayed.

It’s Mortensen who is truly on fire here, though. He’s tell-all-your-friends fantastic as the fascinatingly ambiguous and very tough Nickolai; a driver and disposal man for the Russian mob whose past is literally etched all over his body in the form of tattoos which we learn are important symbols of experience and status to separate the men from the boys in grisly Soviet criminal culture.

Even if Mortensen was the only good thing about this film, it’d still be worth going to see for his performance alone. Handily, there’s classy support from the always-excellent Vincent Cassel as the emotionally-troubled, temperamentally-volatile Kirill, as well as from Armin Mueller-Stahl as his ruthless, domineering mafia boss father - a deeply unpleasant man indeed, behind the charming facade of a friendly Eastern European restaurant proprietor who can whip up a cracking bit of Russian tuck to disarm any threats to his criminal empire's longevity.

Grim, hard-hitting and with shots of very black humour, Eastern Promises may be the best and most memorable thing you’ll see all year.

Sunday Song #4: "Nausea" by X

Ever seen The Decline of Western Civilisation? Most likely not, as Penelope Spheeris' 1980 documentary about the nascent LA punk scene has not been easily available to all and sundry since it hit a few select screens back in those grisly early days of gobbing and slam-dancing (the Americans being, as ever, a little late to this).

Anyways, the film focused on such unpleasant coves as The Germs, Circle Jerks, an embryonic Black Flag and easily the finest band on the scene, X.

Like all the greatest punk bands, the members of X had cool made-up or altered names like John Doe, Exene Cervenka and Billy Zoom; they could also actually play a bit, with proper songs and at least two classic albums in their debut Los Angeles and its follow-up Wild Gift.

This song, "Nausea", is from that aforementioned debut, and it's a live performance of the song that fittingly opens Spheeris' documentary.

"Nausea" has a Black Sabbath-like guitar riff that stops and starts in all the right places and a sneering punk chorus featuring the band's trademark almost vocal harmonising between Cervenka and Doe alongside a thrilling march-to-the-guillotine bit of tub pounding from drummer DJ Bonebreak. It also has some organ fills from The Doors' Ray Manzarek, whom was the band's first, and for some time, regular producer.

It sounds raw, threatening, exciting and sexy as hell.

X - "Nausea" mp3

Still the finest album of 2007 thus far

Perhaps Damon Albarn was the new Lennon all along and we just never gave him his dues. Scathing, insightful, dreamy and melodically skillful; Albarn is easily one of the greatest writers of popular music of the last fifteen years.

Something of a complicated man, Albarn has managed to convey his wide range of moods successfully to a large audience through numerous recordings by both Blur and Gorillaz, and, the odd lapse of taste and judgment aside, he's built up a rather formidable body of work.

This, his latest adventure, sees the man in collaboration with former Clash bassist Paul Simonon, Afrobeat rhythmic legend Tony Allen and Simon Tong who previously played in The Verve and toured with the Coxon-less Blur on their round of dates for last album Think Tank.

The Good, the Bad and the Queen is Albarn's most adult collection of songs in his career so far. Reflective, resigned, troubled, world-weary, cynical and old-fashioned, this is an album about London atmospherically redolent of those strangely comforting old Christmas cards depicting a foggy, melancholic Victorian city where people have all but shut themselves away for the night to escape the howling wind and the brass monkeys outside. The songs are affecting, haunting, tuneful and perfect for an autumnal 7 O' clock gloom. It's bloody miserable, and I bloody love it.

Amongst Simonon's dubby basslines, Allen's percussive virtuosity and Tong's eerie string plucking, Albarn's voice is the ghost of our past and future singing over a piano in an old man's pub in a part of town that still has air raid shelters in many of its back gardens.

Each member brings his own element to the sound. Together they sound like a great band. I hope this is not the beginning and the end of their union (the reliable word says it isn't).

In case my language was misleading, I'm not trying to say this isn't a thoroughly contemporary piece of work too; produced by Danger Mouse there's much in this recording that's benefited from the modern studio environment and a cross-cultural influence. It just has a more traditional kind of old school dust sitting upon the desks.

Placebo

Is illness mostly in the mind? Certainly it's interesting that once a fellow has found the courage to go to his GP and been handed that lovely crisp green bit of paper marked 'prescription' he immediately experiences a greater feeling of wellbeing - some time before the pills are actually even in the bag and then down the hatch.

It's a feeling like reinforcements arriving at Helm's Deep, or maybe the Blitz spirit returning on a much smaller, more personal scale. Help is here; you're not alone; we will overcome, now stick the kettle on for a nice cuppa char.

I have been given Metoclopramide in 10mg doses to be taken three times a day. It's like the 25th of December in short bursts.

Doctors and pharmacists are wonderful people. They bring comfort to millions by not actually doing much other than chucking some tablets at you and taking your £6.85 NHS charge.

Now that's magic.

Banksy

It needs just one man to take something previously considered an anti-social nuisance and raise it to a level of respectability; that is, if that one man has something a wee bit special. Call it street art or call it graffiti, but thanks to Banksy daubing on walls is all the rage.

Artistically gifted and with a great eye for the satirical punch of word and image, our man now has something very close to international fame, even though no one has any idea who the hell he really is, let alone what he looks like. Banksy's witty paintings/stencils have been popping up particularly in more central eastern districts of London such as hip Hoxton/Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and the City itself for a few years now as well as occasionally in Soho and Camden, earning a cult following that has subsequently grown into the mainstream consciousness. So admired and celebrated have they become that once sniffy councils have taken steps to protect and preserve these illegal guerilla art masterworks. In fact a Banksy work near Chalk Farm tube in NW1 that was itself vandalised was then cleaned up at the behest of the suits in high places. Hold on a second, do I smell burning?












I've taken to the street myself, of course, not with a can of spray paint, but through a desire to see the Banksy works in their natural urban environments. The photos you see are this blog author's own; taken whilst wandering around the East End of London fairly early on a Saturday or Sunday morning while everyone's either too sleepy or too wasted to try and nick your camera.

Many of the best-known earlier works are sadly no longer there to be seen at all, while others are barely visible having seen and weathered too much of the metropolitan hurly-burly before people decided to look after them properly. Some recent new additions have appeared in the Old Street area that I'm yet to see for myself, as well as two variations on the same drawing that have turned up in East London and the West London Ladbroke Grove areas.













There are still many of Banky's trademark rats alive and kicking; somehow mirroring the actual species' highly successful and dreaded instinct for survival. Gangsta rat, parachute rat, protest rat, toxic rat, bling rat, umbrella rat, giant car park rat with knife and fork, paparazzi rat, rats fixing and welding; rats of every persuasion. The man's affinity for one of the world's most detested creatures is explained rather beautifully in his own rather strangely profound words in this excerpt from his Wall & Piece book:

"They exist without permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilisations to their knees. If you are dirty, insignificant and unloved, then rats are the ultimate role model."

















Of course Banksy is not strictly a street artist these days as his work has been shown in proper West End galleries and stuff, but it's nice to think he's now firmly set on subverting things from the inside too.

There's been a street art explosion in recent times following the Banksy lead where wit, social comment and actual artistic ability has come to the fore ahead of the typically moronic graffiti tagging of any wall or train going with the dumb scrawl of brain-dead youth keen to mark their territory, as if anyone gives a monkey's.













I like it when Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street suddenly appears amongst a row of bins in Shoreditch, or when the street artist known as Eine decides to sum the scene up in one big ironic word on a wall somewhere.













Banksy

'Head Music

It all began to make sense when I listened to it alone, and in the dark. This is Radiohead’s most low-key, lights out or dimmed, quiet, intimate candlelit dinner of an album; the songs sad, wistful and with only occasional raucous bursts. The mood it creates in a room is most akin to Lou Reed’s Berlin, or perhaps Portishead’s Dummy, if a little warmer and less grim than both of those. At times I’m also reminded of Blind Faith’s eponymous and only album, for some reason.

Disturbingly, I’m sure I heard one or two conventional love songs in there too, though I comfort myself with the enormous likelihood of there being some kind of twisted pay-off I just haven’t understood yet.

Initially I was underwhelmed by the idea of a download-only collection from such a significant band at only 160kbs. I mean, I’ve illegally downloaded tons of music in the past but most of this stuff still had to usually meet an 192kbs minimum requirement. Also the context bugged me, as playing this track-by-track through computer speakers for the first time had the shabby feel of hearing leaked demo versions complete with background coughing and the clunking of tea mugs whether I was imagining it or not. However, as I mentioned, once given the time and respect it deserved (after sticking it on the iPod, then connecting that to the proper stereo system with one of those leads you can buy, and then pressing ‘play’ late at night) I found everything near enough in its right place.

Of course, In Rainbows is only Radiohead’s best album since Hail to the Thief. I’m not saying this to be droll; I don't think form ever left them for there to be hopeful talk of a return. My favourite album by this band is easily Kid A; take my opinion of this and that as you will.

Radiohead are never going to release something like Def Leppard’s Hysteria, so stop expecting them to. Why the constant criticism of the group’s consistently high quality output since 2000? It’s as if when a band becomes as big as Radiohead did with OK Computer the more casually interested member of the public expects them to consolidate this success by producing a big radio-friendly unit-shifter of a stadium filler that sits snugly on the shelves at Tesco and Woolies, and simply can’t comprehend the idea of such a commercially successful band instead releasing a few albums' worth of mildly esoteric material that actually suits their individual artistic leanings rather than what FM playlists would prefer them to do. That Radiohead have never been a commercial commercially-successful band seems to have been lost in some quarters.

All these songs have been knocking around for a good while. Good as they are, is this even a proper Radiohead album or a taster for something more extravagant they‘re putting together for December? The songs sit together well without an ‘odds and sods’ randomness to them, and though here’s no obvious (and conceptually unnecessary these days) singles here - the lovely, and rather ancient “Nude” aside - this isn’t the sound of a band merely clearing out the cupboards.

I'd like to point out that the above isn't an actual record review to my mind as I'd like a little more time to slip into something more comfortable and get to know In Rainbows better before I do that sort of thing.

The Krautrock revival begins in my speakers

West Germany in the late '60s and most of the '70s was full of turbulence. Imagine reaching the full sentient awareness of adulthood in this period having grown up with the shame of your country's recent past haunting your every thought regardless of yourself having played no part in its actions. It produced anger, reactionary leftist politics, Kommune 1 and wide-scale student demonstrations. It also produced the Red Army Faction and the SPK, while in artistic fields the energy fed the emergence of the New German Cinema and left-field music groups like Faust, Neu!, Kraftwerk, Amon Düül and Can.

Can are the greatest motherhumping 'difficult' underground art-rock combo to ever walk the planet. The reason there hasn’t been much innovation in rock music since Can is because Can did pretty much everything with rock music that can be done, and inspired nearly everything interesting that followed. All those rock groups that have taken the experimental route at some point in their careers since 1977 have merely been doing variations on the Can sense of weirdness, adventure and rhythmic crunch. Of course the fact that this involves so much of the most thrilling music of the past 30 years from Joy Division, The Fall, early PiL, Berlin-era Bowie and Pere Ubu to Sonic Youth, Tortoise, Radiohead and Stereolab is testament to the strength of light emitted from the mighty mothership.

The core musicians of Can were titans and pioneers; multi-limbed rhythm machine Jaki Liebezeit is still officially the funkiest German of all time and the man with the greatest grudge against his snare drum; bassist Holger Czukay and keyboardist Irmin Schmidt were both pupils of Karlheinz Stockhausen and appropriately weaved any kind of patterns they damn well liked around Liebezeit's lead pounding brilliance. Michael Karoli played the guitar like a violin and the violin like a guitar to equally scintillating effect.

I put a Can CD on whilst driving and I take the long route home just so my listening experience takes in all 20 minutes of “Bel Air” or all 18 minutes of “Halleluwah”. Can are perfect for motoring around cities alone when your senses are alive to everything hitting you. They're also great through your iPod while walking to the supermarket for a loaf and a couple of pints of milk. They aren't good for parties, unless it's a really, really weird party.

1971's landmark double-album Tago Mago will always bend any head exposed to it; 1973's Future Days album will still sound contemporary in 100 years' time. These are probably Can's finest collections of recordings, made when Japanese vocalist Damo Suzuki completed the 'classic' line-up and sang, whispered and shouted in a mixture of language and gibberish that Sigur Ros haven't quite mastered yet. If you're at all taken by my spiel, then start with those two titles.

Of course there is hyperbole in the words above, but this just comes from being stupidly enthusiastic about something.

Can - "Mushroom" mp3

Was Ist Das?

Sunday Song #2: "Sunspots" by Julian Cope

I cherish dearly the existence of a piece of music such as Julian Cope's "Sunspots", for as it weaves its 5 minutes and roughly 15 seconds of magic I experience that rare feeling of a joy of living where every nerve tingles and the brain glows with abstract positive thoughts. We might just call it 'a high'.

Anyways, if you have a love for that slightly left of the dial psychedelic sound that was knocking around in the early-to-mid '80s where men (and women too) sang mysteriously in deep voices over melodious guitar and keyboards, then this track may be as perfect for you as it is for me.

I can barely think of anything I like more than this; it is glorious.

From Copey's 1984 album Fried, in which our man took to the cover wearing nothing but a tortoise shell.

Julian Cope - "Sunspots" mp3

Control

A portrait of the post-punk singer as a young man; Anton Corbijn, famous for his moody black and white photos of rock musicians, was a suprising yet natural choice to direct this study of Ian Curtis and the downward spiral of his short life, through marriage, infidelity, illness, a seemingly unwanted growing success as front man of that moodiest and black and white of bands, Joy Division, then ultimately to his suicide in May 1980 at 23 years of age.

As well as straight photography, Corbijn has also cut his teeth making memorable videos, not only for Joy Division’s posthumous “Atmosphere” single but also for the likes of such demanding clients as Depeche Mode, Nirvana and Metallica. He also made the blinding promo for Front 242’s “Headhunter”. which is something really worth looking for on good old YouTube. Anyways, this much we know: Corbijn has a way with an image, moving or otherwise.

Joy Division are very much a band where imagery is essential to the myth. In 1978/79/80 the lenses of Corbijn and local photographer Kevin Cummins presented the band as a very serious matter indeed, capturing them within, and as the product of, a grim, austere environment not so much resembling the Manchester as we might know it today but rather somewhere akin to a 1970s East Germany where the Stasi are checking your papers and taking notes on your telephone conversations.

Control offers nothing quite so harsh. A rather muted affair filmed in suitable monochrome, its setting and working-class distinctiveness carries strong echoes of 1960s British kitchen-sink social dramas, only without so much in the way of the larger-than-life characters we’d find propping up a bar or scrapping outside at closing time in Saturday Night & Sunday Morning and the like. Band manager Rob Gretton (Toby Kebbell) aside, most of the characters in Control don’t have an awful lot to say for themselves or to each other; my major criticism of the film must be that the dialogue too often feels flat and underwritten with minimal conversational spark amongst individuals, whom for some reason, feel the need to keep the company of people with whom they have little in common to discuss.

Sam Riley is on the surface a little too pretty to be playing Curtis, but he does a remarkable job in recreating the singer’s mannerisms on stage - albeit without quite the same intensity as the real thing’s man-fighting-to-get-out-of-his-own-skin frantic energy we’ve seen on old TV footage - as well as the downbeat, rather lonely body language conveyed through those iconic photos. Aloof, angry, guilt-stricken; Riley does Curtis pretty much as well as we could expect. The character’s epileptic seizures are rightly played unflinchingly and disturbingly to all. Also, as ever, striking a chord, is Samantha Morton as Ian’s girlfriend, wife and then widow, Debbie, upon whose biography of her late husband this film is based.

Admirers of Downfall will be pleased to find that film’s Traudl Junge (the delectable Alexander Maria Lara), appearing here as Curtis’ empathetic Belgian mistress, Annik; his almost understandable affair with whom helped sow the seeds of his ruin.

Like Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, Joy Division members Hook, Sumner and Morris are peripheral figures here, but unlike that film, so here is Factory label boss and Granada TV personality Tony Wilson. The late Wilson is portrayed curiously as a rather toadying, diffident figure whose charges afford little respect - an image at odds with that of the confident, verbose and occasionally belligerent smartarse familiar through countless interviews.

Control isn’t about music, though there’s plenty on the soundtrack - some of which is performed by the cast themselves. Producer Martin Hannett, who was so crucial in creating the Joy Division sound is only nodded to here in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it portrayal highlighting, for some light relief, the man's alleged obnoxiousness. Curtis’ lyrics are recited by Riley a number of times but there’s little sense of the evolution of his or the band’s creative ideas, which are something perhaps considered best left to documentaries to explore.

Corbijn’s eye for an iconic shot is present throughout; Control could be paused at almost any point and the viewer would find an image captured in a rule of thirds (and other) photographic compositional style. The director and cinematographer manage to make the grey industrial side of Manchester, as well as Macclesfield with its terraced houses and hills, look beautiful.

Though without truly, I feel, getting to the heart of this story, Control is a worthy piece of work; though maybe best enjoyed by those who aren’t particularly fans of Joy Division.