Anton Corbijn’s ‘Control’ is stunning. By the end of the two hours, my heart was wrenched and I was gaping at the screen in disbelief (likely because I didn’t know much about Joy Division – including the death part). Something that I thought made this film particularly special and intriguing to me, personally, is that I didn’t take in a lot of context while watching it. The 1970s was a period of strikes and conflict, and Manchester was grimy and deserted, yet the film contains hardly any of this, also filtering out anything of the sorts of shrieking kids, ice-cream vans and lawnmowers. The film, to me, appears solely as a story about Ian Curtis, and much world-building context/background is unnecessary. There’s no way I can truly explain it, but I feel like ‘Control’ hit me in a way I didn’t expect due to the way it made me feel like Curtis was alone, and the world didn’t revolve around him but he was the world.

This is something I would like to explore when creating our own music video, how we can use context, or by stripping away context, to create a certain mood or feeling about a character.