Tremendous documentary. Interviews with Annik Honore (finally!), Tony Wilson (and not someone playing Tony Wilson), and all of the surviving band members (Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris, & Peter Hook) plus Buzzcock Pete Shelley and Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon, plus music journalist and Joy Division biographer Paul Morley, plus album designer Peter Saville … this is really a goldmine for Joy Division fans. Truly, an overwhelming amount of detailed information here. Even if you believe you’ve heard it all, stories become more than honest talk when told by someone who was actually there. Plus loads of vintage footage of the band performing in various venues. More than I knew existed.
Buy,Download, Or Stream Joy Division! Click HereInterestingly enough the documentary starts off with a quote, that I found to be quite compelling:
To be current is to bag ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world–and at the same time that threatens to kill everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.
Buy,Download, Or Stream Joy Division! Click Here–Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air
This will give you some indication that this is not your typical rock documentary that recounts the rise and drop of yet another generic rock band. This is a rock documentary that is completley different from any that you have seen before, and that is fitting given the subject matter. Manchester, we learn, was in many ways the first fresh city. And Joy Division, in many ways was creatively inspired (if that is the honest word) by the fact that they lived in a purely utilitarian city designed to maximize economic efficiency. (Bernard Sumner mentions, almost in passing, that he never saw a tree until he was nine.) If Control was primarily a memoir about a marriage, then Grant Gee’s “Joy Division” is about a position and a time: Manchester in the unhurried seventies. This sounds ambitious, and it is, but Gee succeeds brilliantly in giving us an conception of where those mysterious Joy Division sounds & visions were coming from. This is a documentary that attempts to contextualize a band that dared to be culturally distinguished, and does so in a culturally important method.
Manchester is both cerebrally & viscerally modern and this is a documentary that strikes to the core of how Joy Division processed the environment that became so powerful a section of their music. One might almost say that this is a documentary with two subjects: Joy Division & Manchester. Grant Gee certainly has a point of concept here, and many of those interviewed here seem to part the plan that there is a “psychogeographic” (at least two of them spend that very word) link between the time and the set it was made & the Joy Division sound. This is maybe not a surprising observation to invent for it seems definite that we are all, to a obvious extent, products of our environment, but rarely has this oft concept axiom been so well expressed, and few, I suspect, have explored it more thoroughly than Ian Curtis.
This documentary is, in short, everything that Control was not.
It is fat of tall insight.
The most insightful and revealing and spicy interview is the Annik Honore interview. She is a very resplendent, very sensitive creature, and also one with a very refined sensibility. When she discusses Ian’s stage presence and how he transformed into another kind of person onstage it is haunting and one feels that she among all that knew him, knew & understood him best.
The surviving Joy Division, now Current Order, band members are surprisingly upbeat. Each of them breaks into laughter very easily when discussing the past. Apparently, the band shied away from playing Joy Division songs until recently.
One particularly memorable moment is when Sumner plays a tape of Ian Curtis answering questions under hypnosis. Sumner asks him to remember a time before he was born and then asks him what he is doing. Ian responds that he is reading books about the law. This is a hauntingly Kafkaesque moment.
Even though producer Martin Hannett (who produced both the Buzzcocks & Joy Division) died many years ago (1991, I gain), he is demonstrate here in spirit as each of the band members remembers Hannett’s highly unorthodox studio practices; his “zen” procedure of production as one band member puts it. Hook has been quoted as saying that Hannett is responsible for the Joy Division sound, but he seems to select that here as he insists that although Hannett made many adjustments to the sound, he didn’t write the songs. I believe an entire documentary could well be dedicated to Hannett. Music journalist Paul Morley, in his book on Joy Division, states that Hannett is the kind of guy that could have heard the sound of the moon passing round the earth.
Manager, and co-founder of Factory records and the Hacienda, Retract Gretton (who died in 1999) is also remembered. On several occasions Grant Gee silently pans the many pages of Gretton’s notebooks chunky of phone numbers, carefully calculated expenditures, events and plans, some of which came to pass, and some of which did not.
Also memorable: An always racy Tony Wilson discussing a night that he was to give a lecture, and after listening to the previous speaker (Richard Florida) go on about creative communities, deciding to talk about death.
I recently saw Control & was disappointed that so powerful of the film was spent on the marriage (which makes sense as it was based on Deborah Curtis’ biography) . But this documentary tells the legend that Control did not pronounce. In fact Deborah does not even appear in this documentary. (Deborah is represented only by a few written quotes.) While Control was Ian & Deborah’s tale (as Deborah saw it), this documentary is about the whole group & Manchester & music.
Extras: DVD includes the entirety of the Joy Division performance of “Transmission” on the SO IT GOES reveal. Plus loads of interview extras that steal as remarkable time to glance as the loyal film, including discussions of everything from WWII (Morris calls it “the first immense tear”) to synthesizers (Sumners built the first one the band dilapidated) .
If Control was the populist Joy Division project, this documentary is the thinking mans Joy Division project.
Highly recommended for recall because there is so considerable here that bears repeated viewing.
Grant Gee is best known for his highly-recommended documentary about Radiohead, Radiohead – Meeting People Is Easy (1999) . His unusual 93-minute documentary will not only appeal to fans of the Manchester band, Joy Division, but to anyone who experienced Anton Corbijn’s 2007 film, Control, which was based on Deborah Curtis’s book, Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis & Joy Division. Drawing from interviews from many of the key players in the Joy Division record (including the three other bandmates, guitarist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook, and drummer Stephen Morris, who went on to obtain Modern Order; roadie Terry Mason, and Tony Wilson, the founder of Factory Records), Gee’s oral history of the band chronicles the short, uncomfortable life of Ian Curtis (1956-1980), from his pursuit of art and literature at age 17 (while obsessed with David Bowie), to attending a fateful Sex Pistols’ gig in 1976 (where he met the other members of Joy Division), to his contributions as lead singer and darkly prophetic lyricist for that luminous post-punk band (which he joined the same year), to his May 18, 1980 suicide at age 23. The film includes haunting, footage of the band in concert, including a chubby performance of “Transmission.” Although this documentary will obtain its audience mostly in fans of Joy Division, like Anton Corbijn’s novel biopic, Gee’s documentary argues that the Joy Division legend deserves a considerable wider audience for its mesmerizing portrait of a post-punk artist as a young man. Gee’s film reveals the valid genius of Joy Division as more than fair a British pub band, but as a creative force working against chaos, entropy, and an industrial city in decline to the band’s unexpected waste with the death of Curtis. I have given this film four stars only when measured against Gee’s Radiohead documentary.
G. Merritt
