Anton Corbijn the Film Director: Control, The American, A Most Wanted Man and Life

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MODE UNKNOWN · ANTON CORBIJN · Chapter 12 of 20

Feature filmmaking changes the scale of authorship. A still photograph can concentrate its force in one encounter. A film has to maintain attention through performance, sound, time and narrative. Corbijn’s feature work is best approached as a development of those responsibilities, rather than as a series of photographs made to move.

Control, 2007

Control is the clearest bridge from an existing photographic relationship into drama. The film follows Ian Curtis, with Sam Riley in the central role. Its importance within Corbijn’s career is not exhausted by its monochrome appearance. The more consequential transition is from arranging a compelling image to sustaining the audience’s understanding of a person across scenes.

The cinematographer’s contribution belongs in that account. Martin Ruhe worked on the film, and Corbijn explicitly acknowledged his work in the contemporary interview republished by Focus Features. (Focus Features) Direction, cinematography, performance and writing meet in the finished result. A director-focused collection should make that collaboration legible.

The Joy Division chapter considers the relationship between the early photographs and the dramatisation. Here, the useful viewing question is how the film accommodates ordinary life alongside the image of the performer. Does a scene invite admiration, identification, frustration or uncertainty? Those changing responses are part of cinema’s extended portrait.

The American, 2010

The American stars George Clooney as Jack, whose retreat to the Italian countryside follows a violent assignment. The film is directed by Corbijn, with writing credits for Rowan Joffe and Martin Booth. (Focus Features)

Its premise lends itself to questions that recur in the photographs: how much of a person is available to another person, and how does a setting shape the encounter? Secrecy gives framing an obvious dramatic function. A doorway, a street or a glance can carry information without explaining it immediately.

For a Corbijn viewing route, the film is useful because it moves beyond the biographical musician story. A photographic sensibility has to serve suspense and character rather than depend on the viewer’s prior affection for a band.

A Most Wanted Man, 2014

The John le Carré adaptation places Philip Seymour Hoffman at the centre of a world of intelligence work, competing institutions and uncertain trust. Corbijn’s contemporary discussion emphasises loneliness and isolation in the characters he is drawn to. (TIME)

The critical interest is in the relationship between knowledge and power. What a person can see is not necessarily what they can control. Information can be incomplete, interpreted differently or used by someone else. This gives the act of looking a moral and political dimension beyond the attraction of an elegant composition.

Avoid describing a work as successful simply because it is visually recognisable as Corbijn’s. The stronger question is whether the visual decisions serve the particular story. A distinctive look becomes meaningful when it helps an audience experience the pressures on a character.

Life, 2015

Life returns directly to photography through Dennis Stock and James Dean, played by Robert Pattinson and Dane DeHaan. It includes a reconstruction of Stock’s famous Times Square image. (Vanity Fair) The photograph within the film belongs to Stock; Corbijn directs the dramatized account of the encounter. That attribution is essential.

The film’s premise makes the making of a portrait into a relationship with competing needs. The photographer wants a picture; the subject has a life that cannot be reduced to supplying it. The resulting tension is especially relevant to a collection concerned with how fame is represented.

View the agency’s Life selection alongside the film discussion. (2b Management) It offers a way of examining the boundary between production imagery, the film frame and the historical photograph being invoked.

The director and the image-maker

These films invite different expectations: music biography, suspense, espionage and a drama about photography. Their variety matters. A complete account should neither demand that every film resemble Control nor assume that moving away from music means abandoning the concerns of portraiture.

The common critical question is how a person becomes visible while remaining partly inaccessible. Cinema adds time to that question. A face can change its meaning as the audience learns more, and a scene can revise the impression formed by an earlier one.

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