Friday, 02 May 2008
“This was the resistance : culture and art” - Malcolm Whitehead.
The lens of time perverts memory. Now, right now, this very second, we are living in historic times. Across the world, right now, events are happening that will be chronicled in history.
But us, we’re too busy living, carrying on as normal, digging our way through the day to day toil, the oppression of food and housework and commuting. At some point in the future, we’ll look back on these halycon days, these artifacts of what once was, and we’ll rely on talking heads and memories and vague recollections to tell us what happened and how.
The documentary is part of our history. Documentary makers are the modern historians. The book can tell us but a fraction of history. Only the people who were there really know. And even then, some of them probably don’t know anymore.
And so, “Joy Division”. A straightforward recounting of a tiny fraction of history between 1977 and 18 May 1980, happening almost exclusively in one town, to mere but a handful of people. Grant Gee, helming his first major music film since 1997’s forensic “Meeting People Is Easy”, takes the lens away from the present to events that will, in one hundred years time, be recounted with the same historical gravitas as events of 1908. We will marvel, in 2108, the antiquated and primitive technology of film and projection and 24fps.
Even now, events we can remember, our childhoods, our growing up, the rubble in the street, the weeks of snow, will be romanticised and turned into a world that never was. And even now, just twenty eight years after the death of Ian Curtis, many of the leading characters in that story - Martin Hannett, Alan Erasmus, Rob Gretton and Tony Wilson - are gone. In what will almost certainly be his epitah, Tony Wilson appears on screen talking with great flair, but the silent tragedy is that mere months later he too was gone. History is slipping through our fingers : made even six months later, one of this films central voices would be absent.
Nonetheless, what is “Joy Division”? In one respect it’s 93 minutes of talking heads and fragments of past film. In another way, it’s a concise, almost breakneck - but thoroughly exhaustive - snapshot of a short 1,000 days. In that time, The Stiff Kittens became Warsaw became Joy Division, became a group, became artists, became two albums and five singles old, released a mere handful of songs, and disappeared. Joy Division became a legend then a memory. The tragedy of this is not just personal - who knows what creative limits Joy Division would have reached had they remained? Imagine if The Smiths legacy were confined to the end of the final notes of “Meat Is Murder”. Imagine what great music we would never have heard. This is the tantalising and impossible mystery at the heart of Joy Division, the band.
The main protagonists - the existant bandmates, the label boss, the friends of the time - recall with a fond humanity the brief hours. The late nights in small rooms in pubs and Universities across England and a brief excursion to Europe. Peter Hook offers a rambunctious joviality, Steven Morris a measured introspection, Bernard Sumner shows his often hidden private life. The rest of the cast - known and unknown - names such as Iain Grey, Terry Mason, Lesley Gilbert unknown to all but the most devoted of fans that devour the minutae - all offer equal and fair, thoroughly human commentary. Breaking a lifetime silence, Annik Honore offers what is, in all probability, her only public statements on the issue.
At that age, 22,23, we are what we are, not quite men, but not boys, strange and occupying the middle ground between maturity and idealism, between morals and experience. More than once, they say quite how could we not have known? and, at the same time, with the benefit of hindsight what seems so obvious now was oblivious at the time, busy as everyone was with the simple act of staying alive.
And let us not forget the compelling centre point of Joy Division, the thing that makes us remember all of this stuff, when it could so easily be forgotten : the music. The music is central to the film, and unreleased demo and live recordings populate the soundtrack as well as established ‘modern classics’. Excerpts of studio chatter and fragments of unheard versions appear at frequent intervals. Clearly, Grant Gee knows his stuff. Live performance is represented by excerpts from the short handful of existing Joy Division films and TV appearances (which, hopefully will appear in full on the inevitable DVD release). Without a doubt, “Joy Division” covers everything related to the life of the band, and many things you didn’t know exist in an illuminating and important investigation.
Aside from the music, the film delves into the aesthete of the art that underpinned the work, the influence of literature on the music, the impact of the visual art, and even colour photography of a band that almost exclusively existed solely in black and white. And then, as the tale reaches it’s end, the slow revelation of tragedy unfolds with a mundane horror that leaves the viewer bereft with the impact that even now, three decades on, the untimely death of a young man would have on his friends.
“Joy Division” is undoubtedly a labour of love, made by a filmmaker clearly at ease with, and competent with the craft, capable and respectful of the subject matter, neither trivialising nor overstating the events recounted within. Anyone with even a passing interest in Joy Division should start here and then go further inside the work. “Joy Division” is the essential counterpoint to “Control”, a significant addition and illumination of established truths. If you like Joy Division, you must see this.
“After those two records, those two works of art, everything else is merchandising the memory” - Peter Saville
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