I will say this: Unknown Pleasures was the second CD I owned, having been improbably drawn in by only the bandname and cover. I feel fortunate to have experienced the urgency, foreboding and perfection of this album… having never seen the name "Ian Curtis" outside of the liners. All I knew was that his alienation seemed impossibly close and more earnest than any music I had ever heard. And, I––yeah, like so many others––felt I could relate.

-Eric Carr, pitchforkmedia.com


When, in his powders-and-pills collage of a Manchester valentine 24 Hour Party People, Michael Winterbottom wanted to memorialize Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, he inserted the video for the band’s “Atmosphere,” made in 1988, eight years after Curtis’s suicide at age 23.

The solemn tone of the video’s black and white photography suggests the dirgelike pull of the song, and permits the almost Bergmanesque frankness of the symbolism. The atmosphere is heavy with moral absolutes, with the polar opposition of darkness and light that characterizes Joy Division’s elemental post-punk, and the looming presence of Curtis.

The video was made by Anton Corbijn, a Dutch photographer who had known and documented the band in the late 70s; Corbijn has now directed Control, a feature film treatment of Curtis’s life, drawn heavily from Touching from a Distance, the memoir of his widow Deborah.(The screenplay is by Brit TV scribe Matt Greenhalgh.) It’s shot by Martin Ruhe in black and whites redolent of Joy Division’s stark legacy, but is in all other ways lacking in the expressive leaps that characterize Corbijn’s “Atmosphere” video, and his other photographs of the band. Filmed in and around many of the Manchester-vicinity locations where Curtis lived, Control attempts to bring Curtis out from the long shadow of his own myth — to reveal the man behind the music. The problem with this approach is that it’s nearly impossible to think of a subject for whom this behind-the-music treatment is less germane.