This collision of emotional, professional, mental and physical breakdowns ultimately causes Ian to exit on his own terms, taking his life at age 23 on May 18th 1980, the eve of the band heading to America the following Monday morning. Corbijn’s treatment of Ian’s emotional descent contrasts with the high energy, high violence performances from the band, which often resulted in Grand Mal seizures and on-stage collapses for Ian, with the artistic tenderness of the exchanges during Ian’s affair with Annik Honoré, a Belgian journalist he’d met on tour. The Curtis’s soon have a daughter, Natalie, and Ian’s life begins to spiral out of control as the band’s success grows, parallel to a rapid decline in his mental health, fueled by undiagnosed epilepsy, bipolar disorder, depression and an extra-marital affair. We see the young couple dating, but there’s always the sense that Ian’s somewhere else, wandering lost in his head. The main arc centers around Ian’s relationship with his young wife Debbie, and the inherent tension of his growing career as a rock star and all the sickness that comes, with that of wanting and needing to be a dad and husband. Quite the opposite, it’s bleak, cold, and at many times during the movie, detached from Curtis’ internal suffering, much as the band themselves were at the time.
#Control ian curtis movie
His movie is therefore inherently from the perspective of a fan, but that doesn’t mean it’s nostalgic.
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He famously shot several notable pictures of the band in rehearsal and in London’s subway. Corbijn himself is personally invested, having been inspired by Joy Division’s music in the late seventies to come and work as a live concert photographer in England, and the movie is highly influenced by his previous still photography.
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With a much more serious take, Curtis is the focus of Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn’s ( U2, Depeche Mode) 2007 movie Control, which tells the story not only of Ian, but also of his wife Debbie, and is based on her incredible book Touching From A Distance, which comes highly recommended as further reading. The first half of the movie centers on Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, who cut his life short at 23 on the eve of the band’s first American tour. Along the way there’s copious drug use, death, some truly beautiful music, and the kind of bleak humor to get through it all only possible ‘Up North’. Inspired, they would then go off to form Joy Division, The Fall, The Durutti Column, The Smiths and many other seminal indie bands of the eighties.
![control ian curtis control ian curtis](http://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/control1.jpg)
#Control ian curtis free
It starts, as most things do, with The Sex Pistols coming to town to play The Free Trade Hall, and the lightbulbs going off for the thirty-or-so people in the audience. It’s essentially a biography of founder Tony Wilson, flawlessly played by Steve Coogan ( The Trip, Stan & Ollie, Philomena), and a wonderfully tragi-comic expression of what it was like to live in Manchester, England during those times. It features some wonderful, wonderful music. It chronicles the birth and rise of Factory Records, with bands Joy Division, New Order and The Happy Mondays taking center stage. I’ll not dwell too much on Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, but needless to say it’s a highly recommended, high-energy overview of the Manchester indie music scene from the late seventies to the mid nineties.