‘Twas a fitting start to the course by seeing the film ‘Control’ by the director, Anton Corbijn, whose eponymous music video ‘Egg Hunter’ is also the name of this course. 

Like his Egg Hunter video, Corbijn keeps the frames of his shots for ‘Control’ stark and in black and white. There’s a bleakness to them all while at the same time communicating relationships between the characters. For example, there’s a scene where Ian Curtis is sitting on a couch while his love interest Anika is standing on the other side of the frame in a doorway. The band is in the middle communicating subtextually that they or Ian’s ambition, is in the way of their relationship, that right now they are emotionally far apart. A lot of the shots are quite static. There are no handheld or many of tracking shots. There are no camera flares, no great camera tear aways, just simply gritty scenes that the band is in sweaty, stinking pubs. We get the sense of Curtis’s state of mind, the maladies that plague him, his isolation, his state of perpetual conflict.
For our project, it occurred to me that we could use a studio scene with Willy Dynamo, headphones on while he narrates the song. This could be our return point, our core narrative. Also, I liked the door opening and closing in Joy Division’s ‘Love will tear us apart.’ Simplyeelements that repeat could be useful.