On DVD: Control and Joy Division

A little more than a century ago, Britain's second city, Manchester, in the dreary and wet northernlands, was the capital of textile production. The city's unofficial ale, Boddingtons, a.k.a. "The Cream of Manchester," is still labeled with the symbol of a bee to reflect the city's status as the "Hive queen of the industrial revolution," and a statue of Abraham Lincoln stands downtown to reflect the city's proud suffering during the civil war when cotton imports bottomed out.

In the last few decades, Manchester has been forced to pave itself over with redevelopment. In part, this was due to the collapse of the domestic textile industry (production, of course, was moved to the lower-wage third world) and a switch to a media-and-education based economy. It was also due to an Irish Republican Army bombing that rocked and demolished many of the most memorable landmarks in the city center.

But while Manchester may not be the hotbed of industrialism it once was, it has become the central hatchery for British music. Whether we're talking Morrissey or Oasis, the gray skies and working-class architecture have inspired some of the greatest bands of rock history. In the spring of 2006, the BBC staged a live musical interpretation of "The Passion," Jesus Christ's last day on the planet, based on the songs of Manchester's hometown rock heroes. Illustrating the complicated relationship between Jesus and his friend-betrayer Judas, the event featured "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division, the band that rapidly evolved from their initial punk rock influences to develop a sound and style that pioneered the post-punk movement of the late 1970s.

Any film that focuses on Joy Division is necessarily a film about Manchester, the glory days of the Hacienda club, and Factory Records, the label that launched not only Joy Division and its successor, New Order, but also Happy Mondays and The Durutti Column, and more tangentially The Stone Roses. But any film about Joy Division must also necessarily orbit around the tragic biography of the band's epileptic lead singer, Ian Curtis, who died by his own hand at the age of 23.

This week, The Weinstein Company's Miriam Collection releases two acclaimed films about Joy Division, Ian Curtis and the Manchester scene on DVD. One is the award-winning documentary Joy Division. The other is the critically praised drama Control, based on the memoir of Deborah Curtis, Ian's wife and the mother of his child.

For Joy Division fans, these two films are inseparable almost to the point that Joy Division serves as a complementary "extras" disc to Control, filling in the gaps in the personalities that were left on the cutting room floor in Anton Corbijn's creative masterpiece. The documentary features interviews with all three surviving members of the band, who went on to form the equally influential New Order, as well as one of the last interviews with Tony Wilson, the broadcast journalist turned music promoter who's synonymous with the Manchester scene and who died last year from cancer complications. Together these films are almost like parts two and three to Michael Winterbottom's period epic 24 Hour Party People, which focused on Wilson's life through the comedy of Steve Coogan.

While Joy Division will only be of interest to purists, Control is a more accessible biopic that's equal in importance and quality to cult favorites like Sid and Nancy and The Doors. In part that's because the film has far more cred than most other biopics: Dutch director Corbijn was part of Joy Division's original scene and success, having shot many of the photographs of Curtis and crew that launched the band to international acclaim. In interviews on both DVDs, Corbijn opens the door to the mood of the time as well as the contradiction of Ian's personality as observed by his closest friends: they were able to see the genius in his performance and lyrics, but completely oblivious to the destructive downward spiral that was obvious to his wife.

While it is at times a nearly flawless film with incredibly accurate performances by Sam Riley as Curtis and Samantha Morton as his wife (in one of her first gigs since suffering a stroke), Control isn't without it's problems. In particular, the director's decision to film in black and white was unnecessary. Had they filmed in color, Manchester still would've come out as gray-scale: the people are pale, the skies are drab, the city is murky and gritty. Instead, the high-contrast black and white motif portrays Manchester as a city of colored extremes, looking far too clean. As revealed in the documentary, Joy Division made its waves at a time when the sewers were erupting raw sewage into the streets.

As far as DVD extras go, the commentary and interviews on Control leave much to be desired considering the comprehensiveness of the separate documentary. Indeed, the only segment of any interest is the explanation of the casting decisions in Control's making-of documentary. Joy Division special features are fuller, but the 75 minutes of bonus interviews, while not yawn-worthy, will certainly only be of interest to Joy Division obsessives and other Mancunian researchers looking for more in-depth source material.

And yes, much has been lost. Even the Boddingtons brewery has been shut down and moved to Wales (though that doesn't play a part in either film). The documentary regularly runs subtitles beneath archive images to show what venues have been erased by time -- the studios, the concert halls and other spaces. That's why I love the film: as small as Manchester is, it's a powerhouse on the international music scene, and its preservation is paramount to music as we know it.

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