Joy Division (2008)
-
‘This documentary on the influential Manchester band is a major piece of cultural history’.
Philip French, the Observer‘What makes the film is (director Grant) Gee’s hypnotic visual layering, emphasising the vanished time and place – 1970′s Manchester; a spectral backdrop fading in and out – to which the band belonged’.
‘Among a trove of rarely seen concert footage and hilariously dated contemporary TV clips, the film’s brightest gems and its moving, artfully edited interviews with the three surviving band members.’
Independent on Sunday‘A resounding, absorbing success.’
Stephen Trousse, Uncut‘Astute, complete, genuinely loving, it’s the film for which fans have waited decades. For everyone else, it’s a definitive celluloid model of how to approach music, and of memory’s galvanising interdependence’.
Trevor Johnston, Time Out‘The resultant film is a deeply emotional experience, which delivers, one suspects, the most authentic version of one of the great true stories in modern music’.
Dazed and Confused‘The key to the approach here is probably ‘cut-up’. In contrast to the over-tidy montage of routine cinematic technique, late 1970s punk cut-ups were rough-and-ready collage, gleefully and often haplessly revealing and unleashing the subconscious; digging away at drives and wounds at once dominant and hidden in mass media.’
Mark Sinker, Sight and Sound
- Director: Grant Gee
- Producers: Tom Atencio, Tom Astor, Jacqui Edenbrow
- Writer: Jon Savage
- Editor: Jerry Chater
- Associate Producer: Jade Robledo
- Production Co-ordinator: Ed Webb-Ingall
- Titles/ Design: Matthew Robinson
When I went to live in Manchester, Joy Division were the hot local group and they, quite literally, helped me find my way through this new and disquieting environment. Tony Wilson had helped me get the job with Granada, and I became part of the Factory crowd, who included Rob Gretton, Lesley Gilbert, and Martin Hannett.
When I was approached by executive producers Tom Atencio and Tom Astor to get involved with a documentary on the group, it seemed natural to hark back to what Manchester was like in 1979 and 1980 – a world away from at least twenty years of regeneration and city sponsored pop culture advertising.
For more, read the Joy Division piece from Mojo.
Interviews
Note: the five interviews with Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert, Tony Wilson and Deborah Curtis were done in early 1994, as the basis for the article “Someone Take These Dreams Away” that was printed in Mojo 8, July 1994. The Martin Hannett interview was conducted in 1988.
Trailer (Youtube)
Jon Savage with Stephen Morris and Trevor Johnston at the UK launch of “Joy Division”, 24th April 2008 (part 1 of 4)
Transmission and She’s Lost Control on BBC2 “Something Else September 1979
Dead Souls from the Manchester Apollo, October 1979