new order Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Director – Anton Corbijn – 2007 – UK – Cert. 15 – 122m

*****

UK release date 05/10/2007

The story of Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis: his disintegrating marriage, struggles with epilepsy and eventual suicide – review originally published in Third Way magazine, September 2007

For the uninitiated, post-punk Mancunian band Joy Division formed in 1977, then achieved near immediate cult status through Tony Wilson’s Granada TV show and Factory Records label. The four-piece band grew out of a three-piece (guitar, bass, drums) who Ian Curtis (Sam Riley from Widow Clicquot, Thomas Napper, 2023; Firebrand, Karim Ainouz, 2023; Byzantium, Neil Jordan, 2012) joined as singer and songwriter. The resultant recordings still resonate down the annals of rock: even today, songs such as (to name but three) Transmission, the eponymous She’s Lost Control and Love Will Tear Us Apart carry an undeniable charge.

Curtis took his life in May 1980 just prior to the band’s first scheduled American tour. His three survivors carried on under the moniker New Order to become incredibly successful; yet to this writer’s mind, their work pales beside those early Curtis / Joy Division songs. Quite simply, his work with the band has a focus, a power and a bleakness rare in rock.… Read the rest

Concrete Utopia
(Konkeuriteu Yutopia,
콘크리트 유토피아)

Director – Eom Tae-hwa – 2023 – South Korea – Cert. 15 – 130m

****1/2

A massive earthquake makes the residents of the sole Seoul apartment block still standing close their doors to survivors outside – out on UK digital platforms on Monday, April 1st

Concrete: a structural material made of aggregate, cement, and water. (Definition from Encyclopedia Britannica.) Harsh. Unyielding. Impenetrable. Opaque. Not alive. Commonly used in today’s world in the manufacture of buildings, and associated with Brutalist architecture.

Utopia: an ideal community whose inhabitants exist under seemingly perfect conditions. (Definition from Encyclopedia Britannica.) The English word derives from two Greek words, the compound meaning of which is nowhere. Hence, “seemingly”. Utopias tend to have some fatal flaw. If they didn’t, any story about them would lack dramatic conflict. Thus, the word carries within it a degree of irony.

The eponymous montage of these two words pits them against each other: an unyielding, dead physicality confronts the optimism of a better world. The title evokes JG Ballard’s novels Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975), the former about a stranded motorist struggling to survive on a spaghetti junction after a car accident, the latter about a newly built block of flats in which the residents descend through social breakdown towards a new order.… Read the rest