Control · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch where the furniture is.

In the Macclesfield front room the drying rack is up, the two-bar fire is on, the television is audible, and there is nowhere for a person to stand freely. Corbijn and his cinematographer Martin Ruhe shoot these scenes head-on and symmetrical, wallpaper flat behind the actors, and they leave the doorframes and chair backs in the shot. Ian Curtis is nearly always partly obstructed. Then the film steps outside and the problem inverts: a huge grey sky, a motorway bridge, postwar municipal concrete, one small figure placed off to the side. Two kinds of confinement. He moves between them for seven years.

That arrangement is the film's method, and it is also a precise piece of film theory.

Most films run on what Gilles Deleuze called the movement-image. Someone perceives a situation, acts on it, and the situation changes; the cutting exists to keep that chain moving. The music biopic is one of the last places the form survives in pure health. Kid hears a record, forms a band, world reorganises around him, chart positions supplied as evidence. Control assembles every one of those ingredients and declines to light them. Curtis hears Bowie and Iggy in a bedroom. He forms a band. And then nothing he does changes anything he needs changed. He marries at twenty and stays married. He is diagnosed with epilepsy and stays ill. He loves two women and cannot choose, and the failure to choose is never dramatised as a flaw; it is simply what goes on happening for years. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image: a character who perceives his situation with total clarity and can no longer respond to it adequately. When action stops working, something else becomes visible. Time itself, which action normally hides by measuring it.

Andrew Hulme's editing is where this stops being a theme and becomes a technique. He lets the domestic scenes run past their dramatic function into discomfort. An argument keeps going after its point has landed. A silence in a kitchen holds, and holds. Deleuze's term for these stretches is temps mort, dead time: passages the plot has no use for, which the film refuses to remove. What fills them is the pure optical and sound situation, the opsign, an image with no action left in it, available only to be looked at. Curtis becomes a voyant, a seer, someone who registers rather than acts. So do we. The last movement slows almost to stasis and gives his final night an unbearable quantity of unbroken screen time, largely unscored, the television on. There is no suspense in it. Suspense would require the possibility of action.

The seven years arrive as discrete blocks with hard cuts and passages of black between them, and none of the biopic's connective tissue: no travelling montage, no dissolve, no calendar page. What looks like omission is the actual architecture. Deleuze made a concept of exactly this cut, the interstice, which joins two images across a gap instead of by continuity, so the join has to be completed by the viewer and never quite is. The years in Control do not flow. They sit next to one another.

The bodies carry the rest of the argument. At the employment exchange Curtis is framed inside the geometry of his workplace and the film keeps him there; composition tells you about the job, not montage. That grammar was worked out in British monochrome decades earlier, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, where Freddie Francis shot the working man inside the factory rather than cutting away to his escape. Deleuze had a word for a posture that makes a social relation legible without anyone stating it: the gest. Control is full of them. The drab, ill-fitting clothes. The band's eventual severity of dress, which the film presents as the only formality available to these people rather than as a designed look. And then the performances, the film's one source of velocity, cut fast and percussively to the music, camera handheld, losing its composure at the same rate Curtis loses his. Because the cast learned their instruments and played live on set, the band sounds thin, raw, provisional, nothing like Martin Hannett's records. The film wants the room before the invention.

Here is the strangest thing about it. Corbijn photographed Joy Division in 1979, and those photographs did as much as any sleeve to build the myth the film sets out to correct. He then quotes his own images inside his own film: figures dwarfed by architecture, faces turned partly away, negative space doing the work. You are watching a re-enactment and the icon at once, with no way to pry them apart. Deleuze called this a crystal-image, the actual thing and its virtual double exchanging places until you cannot say which one came first. The monochrome deepens it. The film was shot on colour negative and turned grey in a digital suite, its 1970s surface decided scene by scene in the mid-2000s. Control is not a document of the myth, and not a debunking of it. It holds the myth and its correction in the same frame, which is why it moves people who never cared about the band.

It even names its own method, and does it as furniture. On Curtis's last night the television is showing Herzog's Stroszek, flat unpitying observation of a doomed outsider, running in the corner of the room while The Idiot is on the turntable. A television set in a biopic is ordinarily period dressing, a mark in Deleuze's sense: an object meaning what habit says it means. This one breaks the habit and asks to be read. An entire aesthetic position, the refusal to console or explain, imported as an object in the scene rather than as homage.

That refusal has a lineage, and it is the realist one. Bazin argued that postwar cinema's honesty lay in leaving the world's ambiguity intact: hold the shot, keep the depth, don't resolve the meaning by cutting. The British films Control descends from are the northern branch of that argument. Walter Lassally's grey Salford and Shelagh Delaney's flat regional speech in A Taste of Honey are the model for Matt Greenhalgh's refusal to give Curtis a single explanatory line; people state facts in local idiom and the landscape carries the feeling. Chris Menges shot Kes on long lenses from a distance so performers would behave instead of perform, which is where Ruhe's practical-light interiors and the unprojected indoor delivery come from. Terence Davies' locked-off frontal front room in Distant Voices, Still Lives, held long past its narrative usefulness with singing in place of score, is the template for the static two-shots of the Curtis kitchen. And Radio On had already found that Bowie and Kraftwerk in a depopulated late-70s England work better as environment than as needle-drops.

What Corbijn did with all of it was take the genre most committed to the movement-image, the biopic, whose engine is ascent, and run it on the time-image instead. He proved a music film can withhold the myth-making montage entirely and still leave you wrecked, and that a photographer's stillness can carry duration rather than kill it. The anti-heroic music film has been working in that space ever since.

It leaves a question I have never settled. The film's case is that Joy Division's austerity came from domestic exhaustion rather than art-school theory: bad stages, indifferent crowds, a small house, a desk at the employment exchange. But the film making that case is beautiful, and it was made by the man whose photographs turned the exhaustion into an image in the first place. Perhaps that is the honest position available. You cannot get behind the myth, only stand inside it and be accurate.

Atmosphere is withheld until the last image, smoke rising. By then you have watched a whole life without it. Watch the film again and notice what your eyes do in the held silences: they keep looking after the story has stopped giving them anything to do. That is the central discovery of postwar cinema, arriving in a terraced house in Macclesfield.