In the grip of decay: Jon Savage and Joy Division

“I never ceased to be amazed by the completeness with which anthracite-coloured Manchester, the city from which industrialisation had spread across the entire world, displayed the clearly chronic process of its impoverishment and degradation to anyone who cared to see.” -- WG Sebald, "Max Ferber", from The Emigrants.

“'To talk of life today is like talking of rope in the house of a hanged man.' Where will it end?”-- Jon Savage reviews Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, Melody Maker, July 1979.

Yes, Jon Savage really did open his 1979 review of Unknown Pleasures with those words, a full 10 months before the suicide of Ian Curtis. You find that review in his book Time Travel, which collects 20 years of music writing, and you find it glanced at as an archived clipping, consulted on microfiche, in Grant Gee's documentary Joy Division, to which Savage contributes as a writer. No comment is made about the strange prescience of those words but in the extras on the DVD, Jon Wozencroft says that of all the arts, music has the greatest claim to also acting as prophecy. Music of the seers, maybe -- this is the kind of thing more commonly said about Curtis's Mancunian contemporary, The Fall's resident psychic Mark E Smith.

In the unofficial trilogy of Joy Division films, you find Joy Division sitting closer to Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People than Anton Corbijn's Control. It's about Joy Division's role in the understanding, interpretation and ultimate revival of Manchester, the world's first modern city, the first industrial city, that had fallen on hard times and apparently stood, by the late 1970s, as a glaring symbol of the unravelling of the post-war liberal consensus, rather than the more old-fashioned romanticism of Control, which largely concerned Joy Division as a vehicle for Curtis's personal expression -- his turbulent life became their harrowing lyrics. In Joy Division, we're reminded of the fact that the band existed before Curtis -- again on the extras, there is a hilarious account of a pre-Curtis audition, in which a hippie squatted on cushions and sang his poetry accompanied by balalaika -- and went on after, which is not to diminish Curtis's role but to suggest a complementary view. In the Guardian, Savage said, "rather than reduplicate Anton Corbijn's focus on Ian Curtis, we decided to root Joy Division in their time and place”.

What we're talking about is a particular attention to the emotional qualities of a place, the ghostly traces of history in a city. Gee photographs the old clubs, old houses, old bridges. "All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends." This Situationist International quote appears in a paper by Liz Naylor that you can find here, and besides the surviving Joy Division members Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner and Stephen Morris, Savage and Gee load their film with intellectuals who can apply those psychogeographic ideas to the sound and legacy of Joy Division. Savage, who doesn't appear on camera but certainly shaped the film's worldview, moved to Manchester in 1979 and the city was interpreted for him by the first Joy Division album -- its sense of hollow and deep space, its dark and dangerous nights, its sense of something new and shiny breaking through the sooty surface of the city. Someone else calls it a science-fiction interpretation of Manchester. And there are so many people to take credit for that beside the band -- producer Martin Hannett especially, plus writer Paul Morley, manager Tony Wilson, sleeve designer Peter Saville. Naylor is an early interpreter too -- she made a short film called No City Fun in 1979, designed to be screened with side one of Unknown Pleasures as a soundtrack. Gee gives us a rare glimpse of Naylor's text: "The city is terrifying." So perhaps the best anecdote to catch the flavour of the times -- Britain in the late '70s as a crisis point -- is the one in the extras about the band being hauled in as Yorkshire Ripper suspects.

Manchester in the '60s was the playground of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Manchester in the '60s and '70s was about the destruction of the old working-class communities -- which continue to have an afterlife in such fictional versions as Coronation Street (those back-to-back terrace houses don't exist anymore) -- and their replacement by vast, brutalist apartment buildings and planned new towns. There were still WWII bombsites, old industrial canals; it was a city of damp, empty spaces (Manchester historian CP Lee, who appears only in the documentary's extras, called his book Shake, Rattle and Rain), “a soot-blackened city that was drifting steadily towards ruin” as Sebald saw it in the '60s. Two months before Unknown Pleasures was released, Thatcher's Conservatives came to power and that slightly terrifying and shiny modern future breaking through the ruins in Unknown Pleasures is probably an anticipation of what Naylor calls "the regional devastation wrought by Thatcherism". And in a peculiar way, the post-modern entrepreneuralism of Tony Wilson, so celebrated in 24 Hour Party People, is a corollary of that. We had the same thing in New Zealand -- the new age of economic liberalism brought new kinds of escapist entertainment and new, individualist successes.

It's became a well-worn line about Joy Division that there seem to be so many dead people involved: Curtis, Hannett, manager Rob Gretton, and Wilson since filming the documentary. Thanks to Control, we now have accurate doppelgangers to fill in the gaps. We hear Curtis speaking just twice in this film, once in an interview and once under hypnosis, within past-life regression -- a dead person speaking through a dead person. Ghosts of places and ghosts of people: taken like this, Joy Division feels like it's come together as a collision of Naylor's paper and the long Joy Division feature that Jon Savage wrote for Mojo in 1994 and published in Time Travel. This feature was Savage's reassessment of the band as well as the city that he had long since left and the suicide he still hadn't come to terms with; it included some reminiscences from the band that hadn't appeared before and appear almost verbatim in the documentary.

So, that was then? Manchester is now, thanks to Wilson and apparently thanks to Joy Division and New Order, a creative capital. But psychogeography should also tell you that such ideas are cosmetic. On the DVD, Naylor suggests that you only have to go a kilometre or so from the city centre, even today, to find unbelievable poverty -- the kind of poverty that shocked Europeans such as Sebald and, in 1979, Anton Corbijn (everything looked black and white, he has said; no one ate enough or dressed warmly enough; no one had a phone or a car). And this is Sebald in The Emigrants, going back there in 1989 or 1990:

“I had no difficulty in finding my way as everything in Manchester had essentially remained the same as it had been almost a quarter of a century before. The buildings that had been put up to stave off the general decline were now themselves in the grip of decay, and even the so-called development zones, created in recent years on the fringes of the city centre and along the Ship Canal, to revive the entrepreneurial spirit that so much was being made of, already looked semi-abandoned."

We are the bomb squad and we're coming to town: Bill Ayers, 40 years on

"We tried to build a clandestine organisation that could survive what we thought was an impending American fascism and escalating repression and to make the war painful for the warmakers. And so we targetted symbols, and we targetted war targets. We did not target people. We never kidnapped, assassinated or brought mass destruction on anyone. And therefore it wasn't terrorism ... It doesn't induce fear at 2.00 in the morning if you knock out a computer in the Pentagon that's waging an air war against the Vietnamese. You could say it was stupid and I'm not defending it now. You could call it a lot of things but calling it 'terror' is what I'm arguing against. And if you want, and I believe we want to in this country, have a truth and reconciliation process about the Vietnam war, then what we would have to do is line up people like myself and my partner [Bernardine Dohrn] and we'd also have to line up John Kerry and Bob Kerrey and John McCain and Henry Kissinger and George Bush and Dick Cheney and ask everyone, 'What did you do while the United States murdered 2000 people a month? What was your responsibility?' And in that company I'm happy to say exactly what I did and take full responsibility for it. But without that kind of process it seems that a small organisation that came out of the student movement, the anti-war movement, is asked to stand for everything backward and violent while Henry Kissinger goes to state dinners and advises the State Department. That makes no sense whatsoever."

These days, former Weather Underground man Bill Ayers is so far out of hiding that he's happily chatting with Kathryn Ryan on National Radio. Even with Ryan's scepticism running at full strength, this managed to be fairly moving -- so imagine what a sympathetic interviewer could have made of it. Ayers managed to plug his memoir Fugitive Days a couple of times, so consider this entry a plug for the movie that followed -- the excellent documentary The Weather Underground by Sam Green and Bill Siegel that, I've just realised, made my ten-best list back in 2003:

This fascinating festival documentary tracks the secret history of a notorious anti-war protest group that operated beneath US law enforcement radar in the early 1970s, bombing government buildings to bring the Vietnam war home – America is described as “the most violent society that has ever existed”. Although comparisons between then and now are inescapable, the wider context is really the general shift from 60s radicalism to the new conservatism of the 80s – a shift adroitly summarised in contrasting images of Jane Fonda, from the “Hanoi Jane” who supported the Vietnamese communists to the Fonda who hawked aerobics videos.

Speaking of adroit summaries, the Ryan/Ayers interview also included this exchange:

Ryan: You've come out of the period of living underground, yourself and your wife. You both ended up essentially as members of the establishment. A law professor, an education professor.
Ayers: Is that bad or good?
Ryan: I have no judgement on it.
Ayers: I'm shocked. You should have.

Short list

It's that time of the year, isn't it? The time of the lists. Usually by about now I need to have worked out a top ten -- for the Listener or, last year, the Lumiere Reader. This year, I've opted not to -- there's been too much pass by that I haven't seen, due largely to the fact that so much of what plays in the mid-year festival in the North Island doesn't make it south. This year, that included The Man From London, Silent Light, Lorna's Silence, Diary of the Dead and My Winnipeg. But I'll happily stretch to a top three: 4 Weeks, 3 Months and 2 Days (pictured); The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; There Will Be Blood. The first two came within a very strong World Cinema Showcase line-up in April. And best NZ film seen: Rain of the Children.

This website has been too inactive lately. There will be more to come soon. Something about Children of Men, specifically around the differences between book and film -- it's a rare case of a film that dramatically improves on the novel. Something about the Grant Gee/Jon Savage doco Joy Division. Something about the 1981 Springbok Tour, John Key and Patu!/Sleeping Dogs. And if I can pull it off, something about the unexpected overlaps between Tarkovsky's Solaris and the Led Zeppelin concert film The Song Remains the Same. Really.

A couple of other things:

-- I was pretty surprised to see, within this list of NZ music videos, that Ronnie Van Hout directed a clip for The Clean's "Getting Older" in 1982. Presumably he was still at art school in Christchurch when he did this. I think it's Bob Scott (Clean/Bats) in the clip, playing the kind of harried role that RVH would himself play in his short art films a decade or more later, which often ape horror movie language to make points and off-hand jokes about identity, our strangeness to ourselves. In fact, RVH talked about all this during a curiously difficult National Radio interview this week. Why horror, Kathryn Ryan asked.

"The fear of existence, the lack of existence. A lot of horror is about the interior and things that are hidden from us.
"The movie The Thing, they can't tell which is the monster and which is the human being. The monster exactly replicates the human being. For all intents and purposes, it's the same person."

-- Nicole Kidman as box office poison. We were discussing this very thing on Public Address last week. I'm with David Thomson on Birth: it's a film of Kubrickian chill and mystery. Thomson doesn't say it but you have to go back to 2001's horror film The Others to find the last genuine Kidman hit. According to Box Office Mojo, it took $96.5m in the US and $113.4m everywhere else against a budget of just $17m. And like Von Trier's Dogville, it used her cold, prim quality -- possibly something that's stopping audiences from liking her -- to its advantage.

Canon fodder: the Cahiers du Cinema 100

Lists, lists – who needs another top 100 list? But the new Cahiers du Cinema top 100 is worth paying attention to. It’s a list you might have assembled yourself if you were left in the arthouse/foreign section of a decent video store and asked to second-guess the critics. No action, no horror, the canonical science-fiction film (2001), the canonical western (The Searchers). Very little from the past two decades – just Almodovar’s Talk to Her and Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (Americans would have said Blue Velvet, and it’s the one that everything since has flowed from, but Mulholland was finished with French money). No Spielberg, no Coens, no Cronenberg, no Tarantino, no Malick, no Scorsese but Woody Allen – there’s a snub. No Brian De Palma, no Peter Jackson, no James Cameron. And some directors just go out of fashion: no Bertolucci, no Herzog, no Wenders, no Fassbinder, no Polanski, no Pasolini – and, again, there’s a snub.

And nothing British? Heaven forbid. The British – or at least the Daily Telegraph – have tried to kick up a patriotic stink about this. The closest they get is 2001, shot in Britain with a British crew but with a US director and US finance. But would what you choose? Your top 100 directors might take in Leigh, Loach, Powell or Lean, but for which films? Should Naked and Peeping Tom be there?

So do the groovy French hate the plodding Brits? In the Telegraph, John Baxter, a Paris-based film critic, says, "It's a little surprising for sure but the French film industry, and especially Cahiers du Cinema, has long had a rather suspicious view of British moviemaking. If you look at these choices, they are not the choices of film fans but of film specialists, and French film specialists at that."

But another commentator dug up a much juicier quote, from Truffaut in 1957:

The British cinema is made of dullness and reflects a submissive lifestyle, where enthusiasm, warmth and zest are nipped in the bud. A film is a born loser just because it is English.

Nothing from New Zealand either, of course. But before Jane Campion’s reputation dimmed, you might have had your fingers crossed for The Piano – the French loved that.

So what’s here? As usual, Citizen Kane is the immovable object at the top, while the second choice is an excellent one: The Night of the Hunter (pictured). Vertigo is at number 8, lower than you’d pick for the most French of Hitchcock’s films. The other Hitchcocks are North by Northwest and Notorious. Their Godards are Contempt and Breathless. Murnau is here three times, for Sunrise, Nosferatu and Tabu. Fellini is in for 8 ½ and La Dolce Vita, Coppola for The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, Cimino for The Deer Hunter. Jean Eustache’s brilliant The Mother and the Whore is here and you wouldn’t see that on many American lists. Ditto La Jetee. Visconti is in for The Leopard and Senso. Antonioni for L’avventura, Bergman for Fanny and Alexander, Dreyer for both Getrud and The Passion of Joan of Arc, Tarkovsky for Andrei Rubylev only, and Bunuel for El. These lists are argument starters not finishers.