Chapter 5 · 2007–2015: Cinema and Retrospective
MODE UNKNOWN · ANTON CORBIJN · CHAPTER 5 OF 6
The collection · Career timeline
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2007: Control
Control returned Corbijn to the world of Joy Division through a different medium. Sam Riley played Ian Curtis; Matt Greenhalgh’s screenplay drew on Deborah Curtis’s book, and Martin Ruhe was the cinematographer. Those credits are essential to understanding the shift from making photographs to directing a feature film. Corbijn’s earlier proximity to the band gave the project a particular history without making every element his sole creation.
2010: The American
The American, starring George Clooney, extended the feature-film work beyond a musician’s biography. Attention to space, gesture and the relationship between a person and a setting remained useful concerns, but a sustained drama asks different things from an image than a portrait or a short music video. The cinema guide explores those connections without treating the films as enlarged photographs.
2013: a long collaboration in book form
Waits/Corbijn ’77–’11 appeared in 2013. Its span is a reminder that a publication date can gather decades of earlier work. In this chronological reading, the book belongs here as a publishing event; the musicians guide follows the longer relationship with Tom Waits. That distinction keeps the timeline’s years and the chapter sequence consistent.
2014–2015: films and exhibitions
A Most Wanted Man followed in 2014, and Life in 2015. Life concerns photographer Dennis Stock and James Dean: the original Dean photographs were Stock’s, not Corbijn’s. The 2015 Hague exhibitions Hollands Deep and 1-2-3-4 offered another form of retrospective, presenting the photographs in curated sequences and physical spaces. By the end of this chapter, cinema, books and exhibitions had become complementary ways of encountering a career still in progress.