Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Control
2007 · Anton Corbijn · Control on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how doorframes and furniture always partly block Curtis in the house. (staging)
Corbijn and Ruhe shoot the Macclesfield rooms head-on and symmetrical, leaving chair backs and doorframes in the shot, so no one stands freely.
Payoff: The house's own architecture becomes a physical form of the confinement closing in on him.
Watch how outdoor shots dwarf Curtis under huge gray sky and concrete. (staging)
Outside the house, Corbijn inverts the scale: enormous skies, motorway bridges, postwar concrete, with Curtis placed small and off-center in almost every exterior frame.
Payoff: He moves between two kinds of confinement, indoors and outdoors, and neither ever offers relief.
Listen for records playing in bedrooms before Curtis ever performs onstage. (sound)
Bowie, Iggy Pop, the Velvet Underground and Kraftwerk arrive first as source music heard at home and at gigs, establishing Curtis as a listener before a performer.
Payoff: The film locates his art in ordinary teenage listening, not in a moment of inspiration.
Watch Riley's stage dance, arms windmilling, jerking without full control. (performance)
Riley plays Curtis's onstage movement as involuntary discharge rather than choreography, so the resemblance to a seizure becomes impossible to unsee.
Payoff: His only apparent mastery onstage mimics the very loss of bodily control that defines his illness.
Notice hard cuts and black gaps between years of Curtis's life. (cutting)
Seven years arrive in discrete blocks joined by hard cuts, never by dissolve or montage, so time seems to sit rather than flow.
Payoff: The gaps mark years where nothing he does changes what actually needs to change. In the reading: crisis of the action-image. Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image: a character who sees his situation clearly but can no longer act effectively.
Once you have seen it
Wait for Joy Division's own recording of 'Atmosphere' at the very end. (sound)
The song is withheld through the entire film and finally arrives over the closing image of crematorium smoke rising.
Payoff: Withholding a song most viewers already know turns recognition into grief instead of nostalgia.
Notice Herzog's Stroszek playing on the television during Curtis's last night. (setting)
The television normally functions as period decoration, but here it broadcasts a film about a doomed, unpitied outsider, running unresolved in the corner of the room.
Payoff: The object itself states the film's refusal to console or explain, without a line of dialogue saying so. In the reading: demark. Deleuze calls an object that means only what habit expects a mark; this television breaks that habit and asks to be read.
Look at frames matching Corbijn's own 1979 photos of the band. (staging)
Figures dwarfed by architecture, faces turned partly away, negative space carrying weight, all echo the images Corbijn shot of Joy Division before he ever directed a scene.
Payoff: You watch a re-enactment and the original icon at once, with no way to separate them. In the reading: crystal-image (hyalosign). Deleuze's crystal-image mixes the actual thing and its remembered double until you can no longer tell which came first.
Notice how the final night is given long, unbroken, mostly silent shots. (cutting)
Hulme slows the cutting almost to stasis for Curtis's last hours, largely unscored, holding shots far past ordinary dramatic need.
Payoff: There is no suspense built in, because suspense needs the possibility of action, and by now none remains.
Carry this in: Watch where the furniture is; the rooms and the sky are two forms of the same confinement.