31/05/2019

Gerty Simon : Poignant Pictures of a Lost World




"Under the Nazi regime I found myself as a Jew in particular danger, because as a photographer, I had taken numerous photographs of Social Democratic and anti-fascist personalities and exhibited them in public.”

So wrote Gerty Simon, seeking refuge in the UK in 1933. She’d left Berlin where she seems to have known everyone in Weimar high society — not just politicians, but also artists, film makers, dancers, musicians and writers. Lotte Lenya, Albert Einstein, Käthe Kollwitz and a very young Judith Kerr — later to become a beloved British children’s author — all sat for her. Her association with politicians and so-called “degenerate” artists — as well as her role as a creative and independent woman, all put her in danger in an increasingly repressive environment.
She settled in Chelsea, and re-established herself as a photographer remarkably quickly, taking pictures of people like Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Aneurin Bevan. Newspaper reports called her the “famous photographer.” Her work was successfully exhibited in 1934 and 1935.
And then Gerty Simon fell out of the limelight. “She does seem to have been completely forgotten,” says Barbara Warnock, Education and Outreach manager of the Wiener Library, where Simon’s photographs go on display at the end of this month.
Simon was born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Bremen in 1888, moving to Berlin after World War One. Her husband, like her father, was a lawyer. They had one son, Bernard, who was 12 in 1933, when his school, a progressive boarding school transferred to Kent, and Simon followed. Her husband remained in Berlin, unable to continue as a lawyer and judge, but finding work as a notary. The family was not reunited until 1939, and father and son were both imprisoned as enemy aliens. At 19, Bernard was even sent to an internment camp in Australia — despite having lived in the UK for seven years.

There’s a suggestion that Gerty Simon suffered ill health, and another that she moved on to oil painting, but no one really knows why she stopped taking photographs. She died in 1970, four years after her husband, and her photographs passed to her son. When Bernard died in 2015, they were inherited in turn by his partner, Joseph Brand.
“He wasn’t sure what to do with them, so he contacted the Association of Jewish Refugees. They suggested the Wiener Library,” says Warnock. Unfortunately, the glass plate negatives that Simon used had been destroyed, but there were hundreds of prints, along with letters and other evidence about Simon’s life.
The Library has appealed for help in identifying around 70 of Simon’s sitters. They have set up a Flickr page with the images, and any fragments of details they have. Some have already been identified as a result. Gerty Simon’s poignant photographs evoke a doomed world. It is extremely moving to see them after 80 years of obscurity.

Poignant pictures of a lost world. By Keren David .  The Jewish Chronicle , May  23 , 2019.









Berlin/London : The Lost Photographs of Gerty Simon.  The Wiener Library, 30 May 2019 - 15 October 2019






The Wiener Library needs help to discover the names and identities of around 70 unknown sitters who feature among the 300 or so portraits that make up our Gerty Simon collection. The portraits are available to browse on our Flickr page, where users have the ability to comment on, and suggest potential sitters. Where possible we have included any fragmentary details that are written on the reverse and have given an approximate date according to whether the portrait was taken in Berlin or London. You can either leave a comment under each image, or email our Photo Archivist with "Finding Gerty" in the subject line.

Finding Gerty 




A London museum has begun a search to uncover the identities of people featured in pictures taken by a German-Jewish photographer who fled to the city 85 years ago.

The Wiener Library, the world’s oldest Holocaust museum, wants to discover the names of 80 individuals who feature in pictures taken by Gerty Simon ahead of a planned exhibition next year.
The exhibition will mark the first time in eight decades that the work of this pioneering photographer has been brought to public attention.
Before she left Berlin in 1933, Simon was already a well-established and prolific photographer. Her work was repeatedly presented in exhibitions in Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s, including the 1929 “Fotograhie der Gegenwart” exhibition.
Simon photographed a wide range of Weimar Berlin’s artists, politicians, and cultural figures, such as Albert Einstein; the artist Kätte Kollwitz; the painter and printmaker Max Liebermann; the composer Kurt Weill; and the essayist and theater critic Alfred Kerr. Kerr’s daughter, Judith, whom Simon also captured, subsequently became one of Britain’s best-loved and most successful author of children’s books.

Some of Simon’s subjects, such as Weill’s wife, the singer and actress Lotte Lenya, became close family friends. Like Simon, many of them – Jews such as Weill, and left-leaning artists such as Lenya – were also forced to leave Germany.

After arriving in London, Simon quickly reestablished a studio in the city’s western neighborhood of Chelsea.
“Her reputation will have preceded her to London and it is most likely she will have had contacts and advocates here,” says Wiener’s photo archivist Elise Bath.
Simon’s British subjects included the renowned art historian and broadcaster Sir Kenneth Clark; the Oscar-winning actor Dame Peggy Ashcroft; and Aneurin Bevan, the post-war Labour Cabinet minister who remains a revered figure today for founding Britain’s National Health Service. Simon’s work featured in a number of exhibitions in London, including one entitled “London Personalities” held at the Storran Gallery in Kensington in 1934.
Simon traveled to London with her son, Bernard, but her husband, Wilhelm, was not able to get out of Berlin until after Kristallnacht five years later. Simon’s move to Britain in 1933 was, in part, precipitated by the fact that Bernard was a pupil at the Herrlingen school of German-Jewish educator, Anna Essinger.
Strongly influenced by the attitudes of the Quakers whom Essinger had encountered in the United States during her youth, the school instantly met the disapproval of the Nazis. With the permission of their parents, Essinger moved the school and its 66 mainly Jewish pupils – including Bernard – to Britain in September 1933 under the guise of a summer vacation.
In its new home in a 17th century manor house in the Kent village of Otterden in southern England, New Herrlingen, or Bunce Court as it was more commonly known, flourished.

Bernard and his father were both interned as part of the round-up of “enemy aliens” in June 1940, when a German invasion of Britain appeared imminent. Wilhelm was swiftly released but Bernard found himself part of the infamous voyage of the Dunera – when 2,000 German refugees, many of them Jewish, were transported in appalling conditions on a 57-day crossing to Australia. Bernard was eventually able to return to the UK. He later forged a career working for Time Life magazine.
Simon died in 1970. After Bernard’s death, his partner, Joseph Brand, donated his papers and archives – including about 330 of Simon’s portraits and a small number of family photographs – to Wiener in 2016.
“The power and significance of the collection was immediately apparent,” says Bath.
“This collection of photographs is remarkable; to see all of the images together is to get an almost overwhelming sense of Gerty’s artistry and productivity. While the drama, intention, and clarity of the images themselves is apparent, Gerty’s personality seems to shine through as well.
“Her professional and creative essence is obvious: she is rather an inspirational figure not only in the fact of her professional independence, but also because her creativity and the innovative style she is working to develop,” Bath says.
The library has spent the last two years cataloguing the images, digitizing them, and carrying out conservation work. It recently commenced a social media effort to identify unknown individuals in about 80 images. It is all part of the preparation for the opening of an exhibition – “London/Berlin: The Lost Photographs of Gerty Simon,” curated by Dr. Barbara Warnock and due to open in June 2019.

The unidentified images have been uploaded onto Flickr for members of the public to offer their suggestions on who the subjects might be. The library is encouraging the use of the hashtag #FindingGerty to increase awareness of its search.
Wiener’s staff have labeled the images with whatever detail they already have about individual pictures. Some of it comes from notes on the back of them which they believe were made by Simon. Such fragments of information – for instance “Russian sculptor” – is combined with an approximate date determined by whether the portrait was taken in Berlin or London.
Bath believes that the photographs were taken for a number of reasons. Some seem to be publicity shots, others are commissions for private individuals.
“What strikes me is the artistry of these images,” she notes. “Gerty was so clearly an artist who was carrying out incredibly creative, quite experimental work, probably in part for her own enjoyment and artistic development.”
It is likely that the identities of some will never be revealed. A small number of images were, for instance, taken at a glass factory in the east German city of Jena and feature workers from the factory.

The library is, however, more optimistic that it will be able to uncover the identities of the sitters in the portrait studio images. “The photographs have a real power to them which seems to capture people’s imaginations,” says Bath.
It has already had some early successes. A researcher in Austria, for instance, has helped solve the mystery of the identities of a mother and daughter photographed in Berlin in the late 1920s. They were revealed to be Ella af Wirsén, the wife of Swedish diplomat and writer Einar af Wirsén, and their daughter Ulla. Af Wirsén served as Sweden’s envoy to Berlin from 1925 to 1937, and also had postings in Romania, Greece, Yugoslavia and Italy.
Alexander Iolas, a Greek ballet dancer who came to study in Berlin but fled Germany for Paris when the Nazis came to power, has also been identified. He later became a prominent US and European art collector and gallery owner and has been dubbed “the man who discovered Warhol.”
“For me,” says Bath, “the Berlin images are particularly powerful, reflecting as they do the rich cultural milieu of the city at the time; its dynamism and breadth.
“It is, however, inevitable that your reaction to these images is affected by the knowledge of what was to come. While Gerty was able to leave Nazi Germany and build a new and successful life for herself in the UK, so many were not,” she adds.

Who did Gerty Simon shoot? The world’s oldest Holocaust museum wants to know. By Robert Philpot. The Times of Israel , November 23, 2018. 












Lost photographs from Weimar-era Berlin and 1930s London are to go on display, telling the remarkable story of a refugee fleeing the Nazis who has fallen through the gaps of art history.

Gerty Simon was an accomplished and successful photographer who staged exhibitions in Germany and Britain, but is barely known today.

Her subjects in Berlin included Albert Einstein and the singer Lotte Lenya, famous first for her thrilling performances of songs by her husband, Kurt Weill, and then 30 years later for her role as the terrifying Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love. In London, she photographed Peggy Ashcroft, Kenneth Clark and Nye Bevan.
Simon’s work will this month go on display at the Wiener Library in London, the world’s oldest archive of material on the Holocaust and the Nazi era.
About 350 startling prints were left to the Wiener after the death in 2015 of Simon’s son, Bernard. Senior curator Barbara Warnock said they were anticipating an archive telling the life of Bernard, who was 12 when he came with his mother to London, not the photographs.
It soon became clear they needed to discover more about Gerty Simon. “The documentation seems to show that she was quite a prominent and famous photographer at the time but she’s been completely forgotten,” said Warnock. “It’s great to have this opportunity to get her work out there again.”
It is obvious from the Berlin photographs that Simon was well connected in the 1920s Berlin scene of actors, writers, composers, dancers and artists, as well as Social Democrat politicians.
One particularly striking portrait from 1929 is of a six-year-old girl, the late Judith Kerr, who would herself come to London with her family in 1933. She went on to find fame as a writer and illustrator of the Mog series and The Tiger Who Came to Tea.

Warnock said Simon and her son fled Berlin in 1933 and settled in Britain. She left behind her husband, who had been a judge and was permitted to carry on working as a notary, a reflection of how much paperwork Jewish families had to deal with.
Warnock said Simon felt unsafe after photographing so many Social Democrats. “She felt exposed, that she might be targeted. She left her husband, her home, her career, her studio to come to the UK.”
Within a short period of time she was photographing leading figures in London. “The impression you get is that she was a force of nature.”

Her work featured in a number of exhibitions, including one called London Personalities at the Storran Gallery in Kensington, west London, in 1934. One newspaper critic described her as a “most brilliant and original of Berlin photographers”.
Simon’s husband managed to join his family in London in 1939 and when war broke out was interned, as was his son and most German Jewish refugees.
It was particularly grim for Bernard as he was one of about 2,500 men, mostly German Jews, sent to Australia on the passenger ship Dunera. He managed to get back and when he did so he joined the Pioneer Corps.

Warnock said Bernard’s partner, on leaving the archive, said that he was not resentful about the internment and was grateful that Britain took in the family.
Simon seems to have stopped working as a photographer around the time of the war and has been somewhat forgotten. The Wiener hopes the show, part of a nationwide arts festival called Insiders/Outsiders celebrating the contribution of refugees from Nazi Europe, will go some way to rectifying that.
“Her photography career was quite short but rather brilliant,” said Warnock

UK show revives lost work of photographer who fled Nazis. By Mark Brown. The Guardian , May 26, 2019. 



























29/05/2019

Us by Jordan Peele





Doppelgängers have been trailing Jordan Peele for decades. The 40-year-old Oscar-winning writer-director-producer behind Get Out and the upcoming film Us, this year’s SXSW phenomenon, spent a few years in upstate New York when he was a student at Sarah Lawrence College. Every time he exited the midnight train into Bronxville, he’d brace himself—imagining he was about to see his mirror image looking back at him, walking the opposite direction into the tunnel from which he had just emerged

“It was one of these nightmarish things, that creepy feeling of, I’ve got to get out of here because I don’t know what is coming,” said the director after the raucous debut of his latest film, during a group interview in Austin alongside his two leads, Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke.
The Twilight Zone—a classic paranormal series Peele recently rebooted for CBS All Access—played in heavy rotation in his home, Peele said. But he was particularly influenced by a 1960 episode titled “Mirror Image,” starring Vera Miles and Martin Milner. He was never able to rid himself of the primal fear its doppelgänger mythology induced, which got him wondering: why is this sort of terror so visceral? When it comes to doubles, what are we so afraid of?

His conclusion was that self-examination may be the scariest monster of all. “It led me to this thing that we don’t look at ourselves,” Peele said. “It’s too hard for us to look at ourselves, both as individuals and as a group.”

Peele’s new film, which left Austin audiences both terrified and perplexed at its world premiere Friday night, centers on the Wilson family and their ill-fated vacation to Santa Cruz—the sleepy beachfront community that was the site of childhood trauma for Adelaide (Nyong’o’s character). That incident comes back to haunt the family’s matriarch and her brood when a family of four replicants show up on their driveway. Dressed in red jumpsuits and armed with nefarious intentions, this foursome isn’t looking for a dinner invite. Rather, “the tethered,” as Peele calls them, have returned to reclaim what’s theirs, having grown fed up with serving as the slavish shadows of our well-meaning protagonists.

Peele has a lot to say in the film, both about who we are as human beings and specifically who we are as Americans. But he’s also happy to play homage to his favorite horror films from his childhood, including the 1980s vampire flick The Lost Boys—which was also set in this coastal California town—and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Vertigo, two films tethered to the Bay Area of northern California. He was also looking to put something on the screen that we hadn’t seen before.
“I want to see a black family on the beach, goddammit!” he said with a bit of a laugh. “I want to see a black family buy a boat. That happens. And we’ve never seen it.”

It’s a sentiment that Duke—whose hapless American dad, Gabe, is a far cry from M’Baku, his herculean character from Black Panther—was happy to help depict. “It’s really interesting and beautiful to define what the all-American family looks like, and what it should look like when it comes through representation,” the actor said. “They could both be terrifying and something to aspire to.”

Unbridled terror comes through in many ways in Us—but no one in the film is scarier than Nyong’o herself, who had trouble articulating how she views her two characters. She could, however, easily describe how she embodied them. Playing two versions of the same woman—one graceful and maternal, the other guttural and rabid—the Oscar-winning actress navigated her duality by taking dance classes and then making that elegance look monstrous.

“With the red character, Jordan used two words: queen and cockroach,” said Nyong’o. “They were such dissonant ideas, but there’s a stillness to both. Queens are often very regal, and they rule with just their energy. With cockroaches, there’s always an element of surprise.”
“And they are both survivors,” added Peele, before launching into praise for his leading lady.
“When I was watching this [with the audience], I was stricken,” he said. “Lupita does Ripley [Alien], she does Clarice Starling, and she does Hannibal Lecter [both from Silence of the Lambs] in one movie. It’s crazy.”

Nyong’o also plays off her Black Panther co-star and former Yale classmate Duke with an ease that gives a grateful audience a moment to breathe, while Duke brings much-needed levity.
“[At that screening,] Winston got more laughs than I’ve ever gotten in my professional career in comedy. This is not fair. It’s not fair,” said Peele. “There was a rhythm between the two that allowed the other one to sing and go even further. Lupita is constantly cranking up the tension in this movie. Whether it’s in the Adelaide role or the Red role, she is cranking the audience up. Winston’s the release valve to that. And both of them are needed.”

Following the screening Friday night, Peele expanded on the heavier thematic elements to the film in an audience-led Q&A: “We are in a time where we fear the other, whether it’s the mysterious invader who might kill us or take our jobs, or the faction that doesn’t live near us that votes differently than we did. Maybe the evil is us. Maybe the monster that we’re looking at has our face.”
It’s a sentiment Peele examines from different angles in Us. There is a Hands Across America motif that recurs throughout the film, serving as another reminder of the duality Peele is examining via his heroes and villains: “Hands Across America was this idea of American optimism and hope, and Ronald Reagan-style-we-can-get-things-done-if-we-just-hold-hands,” he said of the 1986 benefit event, which saw 6.5 million people link arms across the continental United States.




“It’s a great gesture—but you can’t actually cure hunger and all that,” he added, saying that the charity initiative coincided with darker images both personally and culturally. “That was when I was afraid of horror movies. That’s when the Challenger disaster happened. There are several 80s images that conjure up a feeling of both bliss and innocence, and also the darkest of the dark.”
In the end, that’s what Peele is really exploring in Us: that every good side, every positive development both in our country collectively and to us individually, comes at the expense of someone else’s suffering, whether we realize it or not. That may be a human trait—but to Peele, it’s also particularly American.

“I wanted to say something about the state of this country. It’s the one I live in. It’s the one I know best, and it’s the one that I have the most complicated pride and simultaneous guilt about being from,” he said.

“We live in a country that is about every man is created equal, and [yet] it's built on the backs of genocide. It's built on bloody soil. In the very DNA of this country, there are great ideas, and there are the worst horrors that humans can create. Genocide, rape, slavery. So I feel like if I’m going to accept the privilege I have as a modern American with opportunity, I have to take on some of that guilt of the sins. The sins, the people who suffer and have suffered so I can have . . .” With that, he trailed off.


Jordan Peele Breaks Down His Get Out Follow-Up: “Maybe the Evil Is Us”. By Nicole Sperling. Vanity Fair  , March 10 , 2019.






When Jordan Peele’s directorial debut Get Out hit screens in 2017, it was a revelation. Peele was known as an incisive comedian from his racially frank, wide-ranging sketch show Key and Peele, but nothing in his history suggested he had such a talent for crafting mesmerizing horror stories. Get Out is a startling, frightening film, but it’s also meticulously crafted to make the audience politically and socially uncomfortable, with a candid, unflinching message about how black and white Americans interact, and an allegorical underpinning designed to make viewers of any race squirm with discomfort — while still laughing at the ironic humor in Peele’s script.
Peele has been hugely in demand ever since — he’s been tied to a vast slate of films and TV shows, including producing the Tracy Morgan comedy The Last O.G., the YouTube series Weird City, and the fast-approaching Twilight Zone reboot. But the new feature film Us is his first solo writing-directing project since Get Out. And it’s being met with vocal anticipation and nervous hope, as his fans wonder whether Get Out was an unrepeatable one-off flash of genius, or just the first salvo in a long line of memorable movies to come. Us suggests that both of those things might be true — the new movie isn’t as unconventional as Get Out, or crafted with the same kind of watchmaker’s attention to how every tiny gear fits together. But it’s striking and unsettling, the kind of horror movie designed to make audiences walk away feeling leery about ordinary things around them, from shadows at night to mirrors to rabbits to scissors.
Opening on a shot of a television in 1986, helpfully framed by shelved VHS copies of highly relevant horror movies like C.H.U.D. and A Nightmare on Elm Street, Us initially takes place in two timelines. In 1986, as the Hands Across America benefit is being staged, a young girl (Madison Curry) visits a Santa Cruz beach boardwalk and confronts an eerie apparition that looks just like her. As an adult, Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o) remembers this encounter with a heavy sense of dread, and when her husband Gabe (Winston Duke, M’Baku from Black Panther) books a vacation that takes her back to the same beach, she starts experiencing frightening flashbacks. Soon, eerie dopplegängers of Adelaide, Gabe, and their children Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex) appear, wearing red jumpsuits and wielding brightly colored, hellishly sharp shears. Everything that falls out from there — what the doubles are, where they come from, and what they want— comes as a series of shocks better experienced than described.
Us doesn’t foreground its social metaphor as openly as Get Out, but it’s baked into the premise just as thoroughly. At the post-premiere Q&A at SXSW, Peele said the film is fundamentally about America’s misplaced fear of outsiders. “This movie is about this country,” he said. “We’re in a time where we fear the other, whether it’s the mysterious invader that we think is going to come and kill us and take our jobs, or the faction we don’t live near, who voted a different way than us. We’re all about pointing the finger. And I wanted to suggest that maybe the monster we really need to look at has our face. Maybe the evil, it’s us.”
But while that metaphor plays out in the most literal way, as Adelaide and her family face warped mirror images of themselves, another strong metaphor emerges from the story: a message about wealth inequity, and how easy it is to be unaware of privilege and comfort, while other people are suffering and hungry. Adelaide and her family — and their friends, the Tyler family (Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, and twins Cali and Noelle Sheldon) — live in comparative luxury, and have the freedom to fixate on trivia like whether Jacob can get a magic trick to work, or whether Gabe’s tiny new boat is big enough for the whole family. They’re oblivious to the depths of the suffering going on not far away, among people who are remarkably similar to them, apart from the circumstances of how they came into the world.
And Peele makes the point that where the doubles may look and act like monsters, especially to their victims, they still have an unacknowledged humanity that brings them a kind of horrible pathos. When Adelaide, badly shaken by their arrival, asks one of them what it is, it answers, with a rictus grin, “We’re Americans.”
It’s a hell of a heady experience while it’s running, but it leaves behind a lot of baffling questions. Compared to Get Out, Us feels like more conventional modern horror. It follows a familiar storytelling pattern — initial scare, a drop back to calm and familiar scenes that set up the characters, a series of foreshadowing events and fake-out scares, a sudden escalation of tension. The leadup sometimes feels frustratingly slow and repetitive, especially when the audience isn’t really learning anything new about the characters, apart from the fact that Gabe is oblivious to Adelaide’s past trauma, and that Zora and Jacob don’t particularly get along. And the transition into real horror is so abrupt, it’s almost comical — until it isn’t.




Fans of modern horror will find a lot of familiar ground in Us once the dopplegängers appear. Their initial entrance into the Wilsons’ lives echoes home-invasion thrillers like The Strangers, and the later stalking sequences resemble It Follows in their particular combination of lurking, inevitable terror, and abrupt violence. Us also echoes It Follows in that familiar horror-movie feeling of characters trying to adjust to the new rules of their reality, and figuring out how to exploit them. (Though an early claim that minor but startling coincidences herald the doubles’ arrival doesn’t seem to come to much.) And as the story unfolds, it picks up some resonance with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, though without the tone of extreme self-importance and ridiculous that made that movie so laughable.
Part of what made Get Out so memorable was the way it echoed a recognizable reality — the discomfort the lead character experiences when he’s away from his friends and the people who really get him, the friction that can arise in a racially mixed group, even when both sides are supposedly well-meaning, even the simple embarrassments of trying to get along with a romantic partner’s irritating family, for the sake of the relationship. There’s a lot less recognizable territory in Us, which instead mines tension from the extreme unrecognizability of the situation. The characters are faced with something they don’t understand and don’t know how to fight, and the more the story unfolds, the weirder and wilder it gets, with Peele keeping the reveals coming up to the film’s final moments. The ending seems likely to kick off a lot of frustrated debate — at the SXSW Q&A, Peele said, “My favorite thing is the idea that people will leave ready to have a conversation, with whoever they’re with.” And that certainly seems likely.
But the movie’s biggest strength comes from the cast’s stunning eeriness in playing their own dopplegängers. As “Red,” Adelaide’s double, Nyong’o is staggeringly creepy. She gives Red a voice that sounds like a rock-record backmasking accident, and an overall affect of a collection of primal elements glued into the shape of a human, and making a game effort to play at being one. Duke plays Gabe as an affable dork, trying to jolly his family along with lame dad jokes and an upbeat affect, but he turns his own double, “Abraham,” into a wordless, baffled beast, suffering and dangerous at the same time.
And the kids are similarly creepy, but Shahadi Wright Joseph may be the film’s unheralded MVP — as Zora, she’s sullen and phone-addicted, a kid just testing the limits of adolescence and her ability to resist her parents by finding them annoying. As her own double, she’s a frighteningly perfect specter with an unwavering smile — seemingly a rebuke to the irritating phenomenon of strangers telling women they’d be prettier if they smiled more, most recently seen in the pettiest backlash against Captain Marvel. Joseph doesn’t show her teeth when she smiles, but Us certainly does — everything about its creepy approach to seemingly-normal-things-being-horribly-abnormal comes out in that fixed, unwavering grin.
Peele directs Us with a masterful collection of horror-movie tricks — jump scares that actually pay off, a cat-and-mouse game in an isolated place filled with bright lights and deep pools of impenetrable shadow, a throat-closing Michael Abels score full of intense drumming and choral chanting that elevates the action to operatic levels of drama. But his greatest asset is the performances, which turn an already creepy premise into something endlessly inhuman and unnerving. His stated intention is to get people thinking about their own capabilities for harm, and their own culpabilities in what goes on in America. The capabilities Nyong’o and her castmates show in stepping outside of familiar humanity, and dragging an audience along with them into an unrecognizable place, make a strong argument that we don’t always know what we’re capable of, or what horrors we might contain.

Jordan Peele’s Us turns a political statement into unnerving horror. By Tasha Robinson. The VergeMarch 22, 2019.







In Jordan Peele’s new movie, Us, the Wilson family—father, mother, son, daughter—encounters their own strange doubles, who’ve come to exact a terrible revenge. But the Wilsons aren’t the only family to be stalked and menaced. In the second half of the movie, it becomes clear that nearly everyone else in the United States is encountering their doubles—and with similar results.
There are two Americas, Peele suggests. The first is populated by the leisure class and the second is made up of an aggrieved, murderous underclass. So far, so standard, but what exact social issue or experience is Peele attempting to make literal? Us never feels like a straightforward critique of capitalism. The many elements of the story—including the numerous allusions and Easter eggs—never really add up to anything we’ve got words for. We’re left sensing a larger theme we can’t quite name.

And maybe that’s as it should be. Peele is working in the realm of the unspeakable, and as Rod Serling’s famous Twilight Zone intro goes, that territory “lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.” Some of it is unconscious. Even the geniuses don’t always know exactly what they’re laying bare.

Just take what is arguably the source material for Us—Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story “William Wilson,” in which a young man encounters, and ultimately murders, his own uncanny double. “William Wilson” initially appears to have an almost annoyingly obvious meaning: The man’s double is his conscience, or superego as Freudians would have it, and we’re all our own worst enemies. Except I’m not sure we’ve ever really understood Poe’s story. What if “William Wilson” isn’t about what it’s always seemed to be about?

I’d like to float a fresh theory about “William Wilson,” which I think casts light on Us, too. It comes down to the autobiographical nature of Poe’s story and to new research published by the British psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien, namely her work on Boarding School Syndrome.
Schaverien first coined the term “Boarding School Syndrome” in a 2011 paper. In treating patients over many decades, she began to detect a distinct pattern—“an identifiable cluster of learned behaviors and emotional states”—in those patients who’d attended Britain’s elite boarding schools. The image of such education as the pinnacle of privilege has blinded us to the cruelty of the practice, she argued, characterizing the phenomenon as “socially condoned abandonment of the very young” in her 2015 book, Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘Privileged’ Child.
Children who are separated from their families and put into boarding school at a tender age, she’s written, “suffer the sudden and often irrevocable loss of their primary attachments.” Even when not bullied or mistreated at school, the experience of being sent away itself may constitute a “significant trauma” that children may experience as “literally unspeakable.”

“There are no words to adequately express the feeling state and so a shell is formed to protect the vulnerable self from emotion that cannot be processed,” Schaverien has said. “Whilst appearing to conform to the system, a form of unconscious splitting is acquired as a means of keeping the true self hidden.”

“William Wilson” reads like a virtual case study in Boarding School Syndrome. And Poe wrote the story in part about his own experience of boarding school. As most fans know, Poe lost his biological parents early, with both succumbing to tuberculosis in 1811. Few people realize that he effectively lost his family all over again, when his foster parents, John and Frances Allan, put him into boarding school.

The Allan family had moved from Richmond, Va., to London in 1815 so that John could open up a new branch of his business. But Frances quickly grew depressed and withdrawn, and John’s business tanked with the broad economic downturn that began in 1816. Little Edgar, per the longstanding tradition for boys of his age and class, was sent off to school at age six. He first lodged with the Misses Dubourg in a nearby neighborhood. At nine, he was transferred to the more prestigious (and more expensive) Manor House School, in Stoke Newington, much further from the Allans’ home in central London.

Poe used the Manor House School as the initial setting in “William Wilson,” more or less explicitly. The story offers extensive details of its building and grounds. Poe didn’t even bother to change the name of the headmaster, Reverend Bransby (who, according to one source, did not appreciate the mention).

Here the narrator, on his very first day, encounters another boy who’s also entering the school that day. This boy shares the narrator’s name and birthday, as well as every “counter of person and outline of feature.” Other students assume they are brothers.

Though the narrator struggles to define or describe his feelings about his double, he does register “uneasy curiosity” at the “knowing and strangely sarcastic smiles” and “advice not openly given but hinted or insinuated.” Something about this other boy causes him to recall “dim visions of my earliest infancy—wild, confused and thronging memories of a time when memory herself was yet unborn.” When at last the narrator murders his double, the other William Wilson responds, “how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

The double, of course, is a part of the narrator, his own twin. Or perhaps he’s the narrator’s shell, formed the very day he was put into boarding school. Poe may have been portraying his own unspeakable experience, giving his own psychic split a literal treatment. “William Wilson” drew on some contemporary literary sources, too, but it’s still among the most autobiographical of Poe’s tales.
Art, Schaverien wrote in her book, “offers a way of revealing imagery which has previously had no other form of representation. It shows what cannot be spoken and mediates between conscious and unconscious.” She described one patient who insisted that, on his first day at school, he had “murdered” a part of himself. The man eventually recovered, in part by drawing pictures of his experiences—including a portrait of his “soul murder.” (“They made us cut ourselves in half!” he told Schaverien. “Can it ever be put back together?”)

Reading “William Wilson” in context of Boarding School Syndrome isn’t just an exercise in armchair diagnosis. It raises the possibility that what Poe portrayed in the story—consciously or unconsciously—isn’t solely the symbolic killing of one’s conscience or superego but a deeper and more intimate kind of “soul murder,” through which we become dead to our own feelings, including empathy. The same goes for Peele’s Us.

Though Freud popularized the term “soul murder,” it’s more lately been used to describe abused children who experience psychic splits and by the historian Nell Irvin Painter to explain the psychological dynamics of slavery in antebellum America, including what Painter identified as a deadening of conscience among the privileged, literal master class.
Here’s one example Painter offered.

  John Nelson was a Virginian who spoke in 1839 about his own coming of age… He says, when he was a child, when his father beat their slaves, that he would cry and he would feel for the slave who was being inflicted with violence. He would feel almost as if he himself were being beaten, and he would cry. And he would say, “Stop, stop!” And his father, “You have to stop that. You have to learn to do this, yourself.” And as John Nelson grew up, he did learn how to do it. And he said in 1839 that he got to the point where he not only didn’t cry; he could inflict a beating himself and not even feel it.

Is it  just me, or in all this does the inchoate subtext of Us start to become clearer? What if Us is also about a kind of soul murder, the soul murder that results from privilege, from constantly observing terrible shit and not doing anything about it, from our becoming numb to the inequities (and iniquities) of class in contemporary America, from our loss of attachment to anything resembling collective interests? What if Us isn’t really about class struggle so much as the dreadful knowledge so many of us live with and are—at the same time—effectively deadened to: our awareness that so much of what’s good in our lives depends upon the exploitation, even subjugation, of people who, but for the circumstances of their birth, are just like us?

Maybe we just don’t have a name for this syndrome yet, even though we can sense it effectively operating at scale among us. But I think that, one day, in what I hope is a slightly more enlightened age, we will. Then we might see Us, like “William Wilson,” as a case study ahead of its time.

Was Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’ Inspired by an Edgar Allan Poe Story?  By Catherine Baab-Muguira
The Millions , May 22 , 2019








In the horror genre, black is definitely back.

The movie “Ma,” which premieres on May 31, will star Academy Award winner Octavia Butler as Sue Ann, a lonely middle-age woman who clings to a group of teens to the point of obsession.
“Ma” comes on the heels of Jordan Peele’s critically acclaimed “Us,” which is also led by an Academy Award winner, Lupita Nyong'o. And let’s not forget that Peele’s previous film, “Get Out,” won the Academy Award for best screenplay last year.

Black actors have always had a role in horror films. But something different is taking place today: the re-emergence of true black horror films. Rather than simply including black characters, many of these films are created by blacks, star blacks or focus on black life and culture. For most of film history, black actors have appeared in horror films in supporting roles. Many were deeply problematic.

In my 2011 book, “Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present,” I describe some of these tropes. In the early 20th century, many films – horror or not – had white actors appearing in blackface. The characters could find themselves on the receiving end of especially horrific violence. For example, in 1904’s “A Nigger in the Woodpile,” a black couple’s home is firebombed and the pair staggers out, charred. In the 1930s, there was a spate of horror films that took place in jungles, where blacks were depicted as primitive – sometimes indistinguishable from apes. A decade later, black characters started appearing in horror films as objects of ridicule. Actors like Willie Best and Mantan Moreland appeared as comic relief – characters for audiences to dismissively mock. To be sure, there were some instances in which black actors assumed leading roles. The 1934 film “Chloe, Love is Calling You” starred black actress Georgette Harvey as the vengeful Mandy. In 1957, Joel Fluellen portrayed the smart and reliable Arobi in “Monster from Green Hell.”
However, often these characters existed to support the survival of their white counterparts.

For a brief period, in the 1960s and 1970s, horror films began to treat blacks as whole and full subjects. Many of these narratives centered on black culture and experiences. More often than not, blacks played the role of hero. For example, the 1972 film “Blacula” begins in 1780 and is an indictment of the slave trade and its lingering effects. In the 1974 film “Sugar Hill,” a black female protagonist named Sugar, with the help of her black zombie army, lays waste to a murderous white crime boss and his cronies.

Then there was Bill Gunn’s 1973 art-house horror film, “Ganja & Hess.” A gorgeous and deliberative treatise on race, class, mental illness and addiction, it won the Critics’ Choice prize at the Cannes Film Festival. However, no Hollywood studio was willing to distribute the film.
The classic of the era is George Romero’s 1968 “Night of the Living Dead,” which stars Duane Jones as Ben, a strong, complex black character who leads a group of whites during a zombie apocalypse. Confounding the clichéd trope of “the black guy dies first,” Ben is the lone survivor of the terrifying battle.



In a turn of realism, he emerges triumphant – only to be summarily shot down by a militia of white police and civilians. Ben’s death, which comes at the movie’s conclusion, is as unexpected as it is powerful. The scene demands that audiences consider who among us is truly monstrous.
Sadly, these glimpses of blackness faded as many horror films in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s reverted to well-worn tropes. In some, like “The Shining” and “Annabelle,” black characters operate as the “sacrificial Negro” who dies to save a white character’s life. Then there are the dozens of films, like 1987’s “Angel Heart” and 1988’s “The Serpent and the Rainbow,” in which black characters appear as wicked Voodoo practitioners.

Jordan Peele’s films should be thought of as an homage to “Night of the Living Dead” and “Ganja & Hess” – films that have strong, complex black protagonists. In fact, Peele has noted that Ben’s fate in “Night of the Living Dead,” which was released as the U.S. mourned the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., weighed heavily on him when he wrote the ending of “Get Out.” Peele’s character – unlike Ben – survives.

While Peele has shown that the genre can be a daring, unflinching examination of politics, class and race, the black horror renaissance has been brewing for some years.

Over the past two decades, Ernest Dickerson – who directed “The Purge,” “Bones,” “Demon Knight” and episodes of “The Walking Dead” – and Rusty Cundieff, the director of “Tales from the Hood” and “Tales from the Hood 2,” have been stalwarts of the genre. They’ve paved the way for Peele, as well as newcomers such as Meosha Bean, Nikyatu Jusu and Deon Taylor.

The horror genre is maturing and becoming more imaginative and inclusive – in who can play hero and antihero, and who gets to be the monster and savior. The emergence of black horror films is just one chapter in a story that includes women taking on more prominent roles in horror films, too.
It’s about time. As Jordan Peele noted in an interview in the documentary film “Horror Noire,” the fact that there had been “such a small handful of films led by black people” was, to him, “the horror itself.”



We’re in a golden age of black horror films. By Robin R. Means Coleman. The Conversation. May 29 , 2019.




 Sean Hennnesy talks with Jordan Peele  after the premiere of his new film ‘Us’ at SXSW—to discuss following up ‘Get Out,’ working with stars like Lupita Nyong’o, Elisabeth Moss, and Winston Duke, and tackling complex themes within the horror genre.




26/05/2019

Heart and Soul : Joy Division





Bernard Sumner: I felt that even though we were expecting this music to come out of thin air, we never, any of us, were interested in the money it might make us. We just wanted to make something that was beautiful to listen to and stirred our emotions. We weren’t interested in a career, or any of that. We never planned one single day.

Peter Hook: [Ian Curtis, the late lead singer of Joy Division] was the instigator. We used to call him the Spotter. Ian would be sat there, and he’d say, “That sounds good, let’s get some guitar to go with that.” You couldn’t tell what sounded good, but he could, because he was just listening. That made it much quicker, writing songs. Someone was always listening. I can’t explain it, it was pure luck. There’s no rhyme or reason for it. We never honestly considered it, it just came out.

Stephen Morris: He was pretty private about what he wrote. I think he talked to Bernard a bit about some of the songs. He was totally different to how he appeared onstage. He was timid, until he’d had two or three Breakers, malt liquor. He’d liven up a bit. The first time I saw Ian being Ian onstage, I couldn’t believe it. The transformation to this frantic windmill.

Deborah Curtis: He was so ambitious. He wanted to write a novel, he wanted to write songs. It all seemed to come very easily to him. With Joy Division it all just came together for him.

Tony Wilson: I still don’t know where Joy Division came from.

Mark Reeder: I met Ian when he was working at Rare Records. They were very elitist in that shop: all beards and long hair, tweed jackets, and they all thought they were something else. I always thought if I ever worked in a record shop, I’d never want to be like them. Totally unhelpful, ignorant of the people coming into the shop. If you made a mistake in the pronunciation of a track, you’d be ridiculed to death.

Ian wasn’t like that. He was always trying to sell me reggae records. This was about 1974. Ian was totally into reggae music. Dub. He wasn’t there very long—about a year—and he was the youngest one in the shop, and he was the only one you could talk to. We talked about all kinds of stuff, and usually the topics would cross over from music to history and the war. He was fascinated by the war.
I started working at Virgin Records when I was about 14. Just part-time initially, and I got paid in records. They needed someone to stock up the records on weekends, while they were all in the shop. Just helping out, and then I ended up working there. It was back in the 70s. Real hippie days: lots of long hair and ’staches and stuff.

There was this seating arrangement, because people kept stealing headphones. They’d either break or they’d be nicked. So somebody came up with this idea where they’d have this seating arrangement at the back, covered in this vomit-green bri-nylon carpet covering, and the loudspeakers were put in the headrests. And people would sit, obviously, next to each other, and it was impossible to hear anything. You could move these speakers, put them next to your ears in the hope that you could not hear the person next to you.

But Virgin was a place where people just liked to hang out really. That’s why it stank of incense in there as well, to disguise the smell of marijuana. It was more rock music than disco then. In 1973, they’d just had this massive success with Tubular Bells, and then came Tangerine Dream, and they were the kind of records that put Virgin on the map and made the Virgin shop in Manchester special. All the other record shops were a bit elitist.

I was captivated by the idea of electronic music. I remember in 1968 when you had to have a stereo. We’d seen some bloke offering them in the paper, so one Saturday afternoon we went round to this bloke’s house to look at this stereo. It was this massive thing stuck in the middle of the room, like a cabinet, a sideboard with loud-speakers at each end and a drinks bit in the middle, and to demonstrate this stereo he put on Switched on Bach by Walter Carlos, and I was like, “What is that?”

Before that, my only exposure to electronic music had been Doctor Who. And “Telstar.” Then, for years and years, I didn’t hear anything synthetic at all, until I came to this bloke’s house and he put on Switched on Bach. Which was like the Brandenburg Concerto played on a synthesizer. I’d been exposed to classical music cos I played violin at school, but this was something completely different, and it was in stereo. From that moment I was captivated by the idea of electronic music.

In the Court of the Crimson King came out when I was about ten, and I was just overawed. It was avant-garde, ambient, and I’d sit in total silence, listening to this record. Looking at the cover, absorbing it all. And that was my background to working in Virgin. When they started releasing the early Tangerine Dream records, German music didn’t sound like British music at all. And the weirder it was, the more fascinated I was. The first Kraftwerk albums were like jazz rock, with flutes and stuff, totally unlistenable to for all my mates.

I knew Tony Wilson from very early on. He’d come in at weekends, just before closing time. I was the person designated to unpack the boxes in the morning and then write up all the records and put them into stock. So I knew every single record that was coming into the shop, even more than the people who actually worked there. I’d have to tell them what had come in—they had no idea. They’d just look at the list, and they had no idea if things that they’d ordered had actually come in or not.
Tony would ask me to put a record aside for him so he could have a listen, then I could put it back in stock on the Monday if he didn’t want it. He’d come in, and it would be all, “Darling!”—and that’s how I got to know him. I got to know Rob Gretton because he used to come into the shop all the time and just hang around. It’s what I would do as well—go into record shops and just hang around there all day, talking about records and about music.

Ian would come into Virgin when he started working in Manchester and just hang around, complaining about things. He said, “You can smell the drugs in Virgin.” I told him that’s why we burn incense to disguise it, but he thought that was the smell of the drugs. He was always joking, very funny, playing tricks and stuff.

Paul Morley: We had head shops like Eight Miles High, the Manchester Free Press and the Mole Express, and the lefty end of things. That was your great salvation at the time—music and the lefty press and weird bookshops where alternative culture seemed to be thriving. Down in London obviously there was Compendium, and we had weird little versions of that where you might find some sanity and discover things. Everything was not easily available; you had to search it out and find it.

I worked in this bookshop in Stockport, and the shop sold all the great Pelican blue books, which were my education. I didn’t get educated at school, I got educated in this bookshop, and they had a science-fiction section—Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, all the J. G. Ballard novels—they would have really weird magazines, underground magazines, and weird folk singers from the backwoods of Derbyshire would come in to get their weekly fix of odd alternative culture.
But we made money in the bookshop out of the soft porn and the Mills & Boon, so you had a weird kind of strange thing where old ladies would totter in every month to get their ten Mills & Boon, and men would come in to get their soft porn, which we had to order off a van that came in every week. Then I would be selling second-hand records. I would go into Manchester, buy bootlegs for £2, bring them back to my bookshop and sell them for £2.50.

You’d get the people coming in to buy war books, all those Sven Hassels. Of course, if you were going to open that kind of independent bookshop in the northwest at that period, you would have lefty tendencies, so you’d be pushing that, but to make your money you would have to sell Whitehouse and Mayfair, and the dreadful thing is you could bring them back to exchange, so these grubby copies of this soft porn would come back glistening with some suspect substance.
But what was interesting were the creatures that would come in to check out the weird combination of books, which sounds fairly standard now but at the time was unformed and raw: Ballard and Philip K. Dick and Burroughs. William Burroughs was definitely part of it. They were prophets of something that we were about to enter, this weird commercial entertainment landscape that would become where we are now sat, but at the time it was very odd, and it was a beautiful attachment to your love for weird music. There was no doubt that it was connected. There didn’t seem to be any difference between reading Ballard and Dick and Burroughs and listening to Faust and Velvet Underground and Iggy and the Stooges: you were constantly curious to find out strange things that might explain your situation, even though it didn’t directly have anything to do with where you were.
And there were characters. There was a guy that used to come into the bookshop called Paul, and he did the first fanzine I’d ever come across. It was called Penetration and it was basically obsessed with Hawkwind. He used to come in and he always used to wear all black. He had the whitest skin I’d ever seen, and his girlfriend would always wear white lace, and they used to float in bringing ten copies of Penetration every so often. In fact, that’s where I first wrote. I wrote a piece about Lenny Bruce for Penetration, which Paul pasted up in the wrong order, incidentally. I think it’s influenced my writing ever since, because I quite liked it being in the wrong order.

But there were lots of characters like that floating around and, obviously, Ian Curtis. I get the sense wherever he was at the same time—’74, ’75—he was coming across similar sorts of routes, similar source material out of which he could piece together his vision.

Stephen Morris: I’d get the train and go in to Savoy Books—before it was Savoy Books it was called The House on the Borderlands—and we used to have a right laugh at the old blokes looking at the porn. There was science fiction, weird books, and over in a corner there’d be naked ladies, and surprisingly enough the science fiction had little appeal for the vast majority of the clientele, who were going over to the naked-lady corner. I’d just be trying to negotiate some sort of discount on a large, expensive book: “Yeah, have you got Michael Moorcock’s new book?”

Ian had The Atrocity Exhibition by Ballard, Naked Lunch, William Burroughs, and also a collection of Jim Morrison’s poems. I seem to remember that you could go to W. H. Smith’s and they had a lot of Burroughs and a lot of Ballard, and it was just mixed in with the rest of the stuff.

Michael Butterworth: Bookchain was opened in 1977. It was alternative and youth-culture stuff, both second-hand and new. I must clarify, though, that this was the most famous of our shops and the one everyone remembers, but it is not the shop Ian Curtis first came to. There were two Savoy shops before this one, and David Britton’s most vivid memories of Ian are of him coming into the first shop.
All three shops were modeled on two London bookshops of the period: Bram Stokes’s shop in Berwick Street, Soho, called Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed—which sold comics, sci-fi, drug- related stuff, posters, etc.—and a chain called Popular Books. David Britton used to visit a branch of the latter in Camden Town when he was living in London in the late 60s. They sold everything from Private Eye, girlie books, pin-up stuff and Penthouse to film stills, posters and any sort of media ephemera.

These two bookshops inspired David (with his then partner, Charles Partington) to open a bookshop on Port Street, off Newton Street, in Manchester centre. The shop they opened was called The House on the Borderland (after the William Hope Hodgson novel), and they had all this kind of stuff in the window. There was a strong emphasis on alternative culture and American imports. The window looked very exotic, and this is what probably attracted Ian and Steve Morris inside, once they had followed the yellow-brick-road poster trail leading to the shop. The attitude radiating from the shop was, “Fuck everybody in authority,” and that’s what they responded to. The shop played loud rock’n’roll over the speakers, which sounded out into the street years before other shops were doing the same kind of thing. And I mean loud.

They were disparate, alienated young men attracted to like-minded souls. They wanted something offbeat and off the beaten track, and the shop supplied this. They probably saw the shop as being a beacon in the rather bleak Manchester of the early 70s. Ian was interested in counter-culture and science fiction. David remembers them being enthusiasts about Michael Moorcock, whose hard-edged fantasy writing and lifestyle were a great influence, very rock’n’roll.
Ian bought second-hand copies of New Worlds, the great 60s literary magazine edited by Moorcock, which was doing something very different, promoting Burroughs and Ballard, and it’s possible Ian picked up his interest in these writers from these magazines. In exchange for their help in the shop they were allowed to take whatever books took their fancy. They came in every couple of weeks, sometimes more often. Steve was the most frequent. This close contact came to an end gradually, as Ian and Steve’s interest in a band was getting more serious.

Stephen Morris: Once I started going out, my first concert was Hawkwind and Status Quo. I was into psychedelic music really. Apart from Hawkwind, the first two groups that I got into were Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, and the week after that it was the Velvet Underground, and that was it. I liked collecting groups and I remember I liked Alice Cooper until everybody else started liking Alice Cooper, then I decided I didn’t really like Alice Cooper that much. That’s a bit pretentious really, but that’s the way it was.

After that glam happened. Actually, after saying that Macclesfield was a cultural desert, once a year there was a discotheque—there were two discotheques, one at the rugby club, where you could go and dance to the Faces and Jeff Beck and get in a fight, or you could go to Boddington Civic, which was later on, where there was a big glam-rock following and you had the Sweet and Bowie and Roxy Music, and so we went from psychedelic to glam rock—again, till everybody started liking it.
I discovered Krautrock about that time, and Can—I was into Tago Mago. I should say we were forming a band, me and this other guy from school—Mac, he was called. We were going to form this avant-garde jazz combo called the Sunshine Valley Dance Band. Everyone thinks it was just going to be like a dance band, and Hooky thinks it was jazz, but no, we were going to be avant-garde, and people would book us on the strength of the name and we would shock them with our appalling performances.

It never got off the ground, but through Mac’s elder brother I got into Can and then, after Can, Amon Düül and Neu!. I was into the punk rock before punk rock, which was the MC5 and the first Stooges album, which I bought from Kendals in Manchester. Anything that wasn’t disco. I later came to regret that opinion, but at the time disco was shit, and so it was anything that was a little bit long-haired but not like the boys in the year above me, who would wear RAF greatcoats and walk about with copies of Disraeli Gears or The Best of Cream. I wasn’t too mad on anything bluesy; it was just anything a bit unusual that was not Eric Clapton.

Paul Morley: You were looking round to see if there was anybody like you. There was nobody like me at school. Eventually we all found each other at a particular show, but for two or three years before that happened we didn’t really know where each other was. If you went to a Pink Floyd or David Bowie concert at the Free Trade Hall, you didn’t really find anybody else. They were probably there somewhere, but you didn’t find them because there was a bigger disguise going on.
At that point—’74, ’75—music fundamentally came to Manchester. We used to think of the local bands as not being right. Even bands that were local, like 10cc or Sad Café, didn’t seem to be Manchester. They seemed to be more LA, they were already in Las Vegas. There were a couple of kind of strange heavy metal clubs in Manchester where local bands would play, but you wouldn’t take them seriously at all because they just seemed like bands you’d see at school. There was just no way that that music would ever come from Manchester.

Excerpted from This searing light, the sun, and everything else: Joy Division: An Oral History by Jon Savage. Published with permission from Faber & Faber.

“I Still Don’t Know Where Joy Division Came From” By Jon Savage. LitHub , May 17, 2019.






Other excerpts here : 


The Birth of Joy Division.  Rolling Stone,  April 21, 2019.


‘Ian Curtis wanted to make extreme music, no half measures’ The Guardian , March 24, 2019 





Music journalist Jon Savage, 65, has wanted to write a book about Joy Division for as long as he can remember. But the spark for his new oral history of the band, This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else, is easier to pinpoint. He assisted on Grant Gee’s 2007 documentary film Joy Division and knew how much material had been left on the cutting-room floor. Lead singer Ian Curtis was long dead of course (he killed himself in 1980), but there were in-depth interviews with the remaining members of the group – Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris – as well as material that Savage had compiled over four decades following, thinking and writing about Joy Division. The result feels like a definitive account of one of the most exciting and enduring bands of the post-punk era.

Why did you want to do an oral history? In some ways, it’s a more ego-less approach for a writer.

JS : That was an attraction for me because I’ve written a lot about Joy Division. And people tend to get superheated about the band, so I thought: “Oh God, let them speak!” Besides, I like the cadences of the way that they speak, there’s a kind of poetry. And it’s very immediate.

Did compiling the book change how you feel about the band or the personalities?

JS : Well, yes. There is disguised autobiography in the book: it’s about me moving to Manchester from London in 1979 and working with [Factory co-founder] Tony Wilson and becoming friendly with Rob Gretton [Joy Division’s manager] and Martin Hannett [the band’s producer] and seeing Joy Division a lot. And me trying to make sense of how powerful Joy Division were: they are probably the most powerful live group I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen hundreds.

And I really got a sense finally – which I haven’t before – of why what happened with Ian happened. It’s a combination of pressures. Also the severe nature of his illness, and the poor treatment he was getting for his illness, and it all just suddenly really made sense to me. He was actually having fits on stage, and that’s not sustainable. So in a way it was the laying of a ghost.

What do you remember about when Ian Curtis died in May 1980?

JS : I have no memory. It’s a blank. In a way, keeping on at this subject is a way of filling in the blanks. And I think that was just being young. I was 25 and I hadn’t really encountered death before, and so I just didn’t know what to do. Also back in the day there was not really the language to talk about it, and people say that in the book. And I was only on the periphery, so I think it was a completely shattering event.

How would describe your relationship with the band during the time you were writing about them?

JS : I was quite rigorous about not becoming that friendly with groups, because it could be a bit embarrassing; you don’t know whether they’d turn round and make a crap album and you’d have to say so and there would be trouble. That happened to me with Siouxsie and the Banshees and a couple of other people and I just got fed up with people coming up to me and calling me a cunt because I’d actually told the truth about their lousy art in that particular case. So I’d say I was an acquaintance.

It’s been 40 years since the band released their debut studio album, Unknown Pleasures. What’s the enduring appeal of Joy Division?

JS : The main thing about Joy Division is that they were great. The music really stands up; I still listen to Joy Division with great pleasure and it’s not just nostalgic. Also I had a very interesting experience: I did an event at the BFI and they showed [Anton Corbijn’s film] Control and the Joy Division documentary to a bunch of inner-city kids, 16, 17. They were slightly bored, polite but restless – as you’d expect. Then Ian came on in one of the bits of live footage and oh, they tuned right in. They immediately snapped to attention, because of his total intensity, total commitment. He was, in that degraded phrase, “for real”. So there is something about Joy Division that transcends their time and place.

Is this the end of your journey with them?

JS : I certainly won’t do another book about them, but I do feel that I’ve got a greater understanding of what happened then and why it’s continued to nag away at me until now. A very good friend of mine said to me once: “Jon, sometimes in life, you have to do the obvious.” Actually that’s very good advice and this book is an example of that, I think.


Jon Savage: ‘Something about Joy Division transcends their time and place’. By Tim Lewis. The Guardian , March 24, 2019. 



Another interview :

Joy Division and Jon Savage's Latest, 'This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else' By David Chu. PopMatters,  April 2, 2019. 






Jon Savage’s “This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else” documents the formation, brief life and sudden end of the phenomenal Manchester, England, band Joy Division.

Much has been written about this band; some of the sharpest music writers have given their best trying to capture its essence. As brilliant as some of this work is, Joy Division seems to remain in the shadows, just out of reach of critical assessment. Joy Division’s music doesn’t “rock” in the classic sense as much as shudder, roar and convulse. The songs are readings of temperature, light and lack of light. They walk silently for hours on city streets and return alone to small rooms with full ashtrays and no messages on the machine. It’s a fantastically difficult question to answer: Why do you like Joy Division? The more dedicated the listener, the more likely you’ll get an inhaled breath held for a few seconds, an exhale and a shrug.
Savage is one of those aforementioned very talented scribes, who perhaps understands all too well how difficult it would be for any one person to create a clear picture of Joy Division. What better way to tell the story than to ask others to tell its story? By interviewing remaining members and those who bore witness, Savage’s oral history of the band carefully connects the dots.


Joy Division was Peter Hook on bass, Bernard Sumner on guitar, Stephen Morris on drums and Ian Curtis on vocals. The band’s first release, from summer 1978, a four-track 7-inch record called “An Ideal for Living,” could be labeled functionally as post punk, one of the best results of punk music’s exhilarating flash-pot bang. The songs are great but show a band only somewhat in control of its talent. Hearing what came next, you wonder if at that time, the four had any idea of what they were capable of.
The following year, the band released its first full length album, the brilliant “Unknown Pleasures.” None of the demos or surviving live recordings hints at what the band would bring to bear with this record. The music seems uninfluenced by any music that came before it but instead by the sheer fact of existence, the sound of your blood rushing through your veins.
The band became immensely popular. The group performed live and recorded new material. On May 18, 1980, Curtis took his life at age 23. A month later, in June, perhaps Joy Division’s most well-known song, “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” was released. In July 1980, the band’s second album, “Closer,” came out. Joy Division would reach its peak posthumously. Hook, Morris and Sumner carried on as New Order to great success all over the world.
I became a fan, never having heard “Unknown Pleasures.” Many years ago, I was playing my current favorite record for someone, who said I should cut out the middleman and listen to the band it was desperately trying to emulate: Joy Division. I’m not aware of anyone in any of the bands I was in having any interest in Joy Division’s music. I knew of the band but had heard only “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” Then I remembered that in the remaining space of many of the tapes I had received in trades from a fellow cassette enthusiast, he had put on tracks from Joy Division shows. I listened to them and was knocked out by the incredible intensity of the band. There’s no way you would want to go on after Joy Division.
A key moment for Joy Division happened at a Sex Pistols show at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall on June 4, 1976. Reportedly attended by fewer than 50 people, the show proved to be quite a night. In the audience were future members of the Fall, Joy Division and two men who would prove to be of great importance to the group: Factory Records partners Tony Wilson and Martin Hannett. The Factory label was almost a perfect reflection of Wilson; rebellious, innovative and fiercely independent. Joy Division — and other post-punk art-bands like A Certain Ratio and the Durutti Column — found great support at Factory.
Post-punk music delivered on punk’s detonation of rock music’s predictability. Joy Division wasn’t the only band that started at some point in the punk din and evolved by leaps and bounds. Gang of Four, Killing Joke, the Fall, the Birthday Party and Wire were a few of the great bands that fell under the post-punk heading. (If you want to know more, the go-to book is Simon Reynolds’ excellent “Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984.”) And one of the greatest acts of punk-to-post-punk morphing was John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) going from perhaps the most well known punk band of all time, the Sex Pistols, to the completely different Public Image Limited.
Yet what has baffled many a Joy Division listener is the band’s own evolution; how its members, all novice players, went from rudimentary bashing with songs like “Gutz” and “You're No Good for Me” in 1977 to utterly brilliant tracks like “Transmission,” “Atmosphere” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart” just a few years later.

 Without Wilson and Hannett, it could be argued, Joy Division's potential would have been greatly compromised. Wilson believed in the band completely, allowed it to flourish. But in “This Searing Light,” Sumner describes an isolated and workman-like environment at practice, where each player was in his own world. “We were not bouncing off each other,” he says, “we just completely ignored each other, we were all on our own island, and we just made sure that what we were doing sounded great, and we didn't pay any attention to what the others were doing, not consciously anyway.”
While this might sound like the members didn't get along, it is a quite Mancunian posture, when you consider that the greater Manchester area was infused with factories, warehouses and remnants of World War II. It's not surprising that being raised in this environment might engender a somewhat stark outlook and utilitarian work ethic.


“You were always looking for beauty because it was such an ugly place, whether again on a subconscious level,” Sumner says. “I mean, I don't think I saw a tree till I was about nine. I was surrounded by factories and nothing that was pretty, nothing.”



Manchester bands like Joy Division, the Fall and Buzzcocks were greatly distanced from the outrage and fashion that fueled the London punk scene, a little over 200 miles south, and while their surroundings could be grim, it made for quite a creative setting. In “This Searing Light,” you get the idea that it was a “resist or submit” proposition.“It gave you an amazing yearning for things that were beautiful,” Sumner says, “because you were in a semi-sensory-deprivation situation because you were brought up in this brutal landscape, but then when you did see something or hear something that was beautiful, you would go, 'Ooh, new experience,' and really appreciate it.”
Still, how do four young men from the working class, in one of the toughest parts of a tough country, almost suddenly create not only some of the most enduring music from the late 1970s and early 1980s but also easily one of the most astonishing debut albums ever, “Unknown Pleasures”?
In the pages of “This Searing Light,” we get many clues from the testimonies of those in close proximity to the band.

Peter Saville, Factory co-founder and art director, is responsible for the “Unknown Pleasures” cover, one of the most recognizably reworked and repurposed music-related images of the last century. Saville isn’t the originator; it is a found image, part of the materials in a folder given to Saville by the band’s manager, Rob Gretton. There are, no doubt, people all over the world wearing a version of this pulsar spread out on a T-shirt who have no idea what it’s relating to. That being said, if you had to describe “Unknown Pleasures,” the image works perfectly; separate, straight lines randomly disrupted; peaks and valleys and then flat again. Such is life.


Hannett, who produced “Unknown Pleasures,” was a true visionary. There is no way the album would sound anything like it does without him. At times, Hannett seemed almost dismissive of his young charges: “They were a gift to a producer, because they didn’t have a clue. They didn’t argue.”
Hannett was notoriously idiosyncratic and difficult, and the band members endured him as much as worked with him. Hannett was obsessed with isolating and manipulating sound — the studio was his world; Joy Division was just hanging out in it for awhile.
“The studio was Martin’s,” says Morris, “and when you were in the studio you were working for Martin and his whims. There was an awful lot of pot smoked: whether Martin was completely stoned or did have a different outlook on what he wanted, he would be obtuse. He wouldn’t say to you, ‘I want you to do it like this.’ It was, ‘Great, do it again but more cocktail party’ or ‘a bit more yellow.’ Whether it was pot or whether it was the Zen school of production, it was definitely interesting, because he turned us on to the studio being a musical instrument.”
Kevin Cummins, the great photographer who took some of the most recognizable images of Joy Division, was witness to the band’s rapid growth and the mesmerizing stage presence of Curtis. “It always felt dangerous, because you always felt he was slightly out of control, and I’d not really experienced that with any other band,” Cummins says. “I’d seen the Clash and the Jam and all these bands, and I never felt that they were more than the sum of their parts. But with Ian, it was dangerous. The only other person who was that dangerous onstage was Iggy Pop.”
These are some of the nearly 40 people from Joy Division's inner circle whose accounts Savage, who was also there at the time, has deftly woven into an almost detective-style MRI of the band and the forces and factors that formed it. Almost particle by particle, from descriptions of Manchester's industrial beginnings to the area's cultural void, Savage makes you understand that the members of Joy Division were driven to create something of immense beauty, as if there were no other choice.
As matter-of-fact as the interviews are, and as carefully as Savage has laid out his case, the "how" of the band's amazing music is all but impossible to put your finger on. Liz Naylor, a writer at the Manchester fanzine City Fun, captures the band's close distance: “My thing about Joy Division is that they're an ambient band almost: you don't see them function as a band, it's just the noise around where you are.”

It's not up for debate. Joy Division was one of the most original bands of the last century and an influence on countless others that came afterward. “This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else” brings us a little closer to understanding the band and its incredible music. But still, even after the careful examination of almost every aspect of the band’s brief existence, its music still lurks deep in phenomenon and shadow.

Why Joy Division? Henry Rollins examines Jon Savage’s oral history of the post-punk band. By Henry Rollins.  Los Angeles Times,  April 18, 2019.





Inside a catalog of forthcoming books, Faber & Faber refers to Jon Savage's This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else: Joy Division: The Oral History as "the last word on the band that ended with the suicide of Ian Curtis in Macclesfield on May 18, 1980." It seems a little presumptuous to say that this book will be the "last word" on the subject of Joy Division, not that some closure wouldn't be welcome at this point. Between Peter Hook's memoir, Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (It, 2013) Bernard Sumner's memoir, Chapter and Verse: New Order, Joy Division, and Me (St. Martin's 2015), Deborah Curtis's memoir, Touching From a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division (Faber and Faber, 2005), both a biopic (Joy Division, Gee, 2007) and a documentary, and some repackaging of the same songs fans have known and loved over the decades, it feels as if Joy Division has been discussed into the ground, sucking all of the mystery out of a band that was once shrouded in the stuff. Is there any marrow left in that bone? Or is This Searing Light just another way of giving people their Joy Division fix when the cupboards are all bare?

Author Jon Savage (interviewed with David Chiu, here on PopMatters), the compiler and editor of all the interviews here, was a source close to the band as well as the Factory Records team that helped launch a musical movement in Manchester. Given all of the front line accounts during this furtive punk moment in the late '70s, it appears that Savage was able to come away with some new angles to the old story -- Ian Curtis's personal dilemmas in addition to his epilepsy, the severity of said epilepsy, the band's inability to understand it all, the manager and the label boss's failure to act properly, and the multitudes that witnessed it first hand and have never forgotten the impact it left on them. As much as the story of this band has been pillaged, This Searing Light proves that there were still more Joy Division stories to be told. As far as I'm concerned, it's perfectly okay if there's now nothing left to tell.

This Searing Light pulls together recent interviews with the surviving Joy Division members, members of their contemporary bands such as the Buzzcocks and Cabaret Voltaire, photographers, and eyewitnesses, and is supplemented with past interviews with the now-departed Factory Records founder Tony Wilson, record producer Martin Hannett, the band's manager Rob Gretton, and journalist Annik Honoré. Surviving Factory players Alan Erasmus and Peter Saville are there to round out the picture, with a few rare reproductions of Saville's distinctly cryptic graphic designs. Photographers including Kevin Cummins, Jill Furmanovsky, Daniel Meadows, and the legendary Anton Corbijn describe snapping pictures of the band, both onstage during their mesmerizing sets and offstage when no one knew how to pose like a rock star. Music journalists Mary Harron (now a director) and Paul Morley share stories of interviewing the band and reviewing various shows. Eyewitness accounts from fans like Jon Wozencroft and writer Liz Naylor provide a surprisingly reliable narrative to compliment the professional angle.

Unlike other oral histories, Savage lists the interview subjects and their roles in the story in a table of contents at the start of the book rather than giving them the full description as they are introduced. As a result, a reader not equipped with an iron-clad memory may find themselves flipping to the beginning of the book quite often when they come across a new name. It's a minor detail, but it certainly disrupts the flow of the book, something that it sorely needs in its early pages. The first chapters are where everyone is setting the scenes of '70s-era Manchester with its urban decay and lack of natural beauty. This is also the moment when the interview subjects begin to chronicle their individual childhoods, something that can only be of interest to people from Manchester, seeing as how they are constantly peppered with geographical tidbits and some local color. The differences described between Salford and Manchester don't exactly leap off the page.

It isn't until the third chapter when the story begins to move. Tony Wilson was looking to expand his musical influence outside of presenting cutting-edge rock bands on his Ganada Television program So It Goes. This included activities such as giving Manchester gigs to the Bolton-based punk band the Buzzcocks and sprucing up the town venue known as the Lesser Free Trade Hall. The Sex Pistols played a set there in 1976 that proved to be serendipitous for Manchester's forthcoming music scene. Despite the fact that this fortunate gig has gone down in the record as a turning point in the history of British rock 'n' roll, Joy Division guitarist Bernard Sumner and Joy Division bassist Peter Hook don't seem to recall it being all that great of a show. Memorable, yes. But great? Apparently, the Sex Pistols had set the bar so low, musically speaking, that more than a few people left the showing thinking "I can do that!"

Sumner and Hook ride their scooters through the city, searching for an outlet for their newfound "skill". Ian Curtis makes an unassuming and paradoxical entrance on the Manchester music scene at around the same time. He wore a jacket with the word "HATE" scrawled on the back, yet he was very polite to everyone he met. He was drawn to William Burroughs and J. G. Ballard just as strongly as he was pulled to the titans of glam and punk, namely David Bowie and Iggy Pop. He was married yet wanted to ingratiate himself into a scene that marriage (and subsequent child-rearing) went against punk rock ethics. If Curtis ever struck you as a larger-than-life enigma that you couldn't wrap your mind around, everyone's personal accounts logged in This Searing Light helps to humanize him without demolishing the myth. The skeletons residing in his closet are easier to forgive once you remind yourself that he was only 23-years-old at the time of his death.

Indeed, it would be more difficult to imagine a rock band from this time that didn't stay up too late at night, drinking themselves silly while engaging in reckless mischief. He became very close to the Belgian journalist Honoré, an affair that, according to everyone concerned, never led to anything physical. This was more a matter of intellectual fulfillment, as Honoré was always giving Curtis the accolades his wife Deborah could never supply. At one point in the book, Deborah admits that she doesn't blame him for thinking this [NOTE: Savage lifts passages from Curtis's memoir to round out parts of the story]. Having epilepsy certainly wasn't his fault. The members of Joy Division and their manager take themselves to task for being ignorant of Curtis's physical as well as mental state. Crippling depression and grand mal fits? How are a bunch of 22-year-old men supposed to handle that? Somewhere in the second half of the book, you're reminded that there's hardly any adult supervision in the equation of constant gigging, constant traveling, poor health, and marital difficulties. Wilson and Gretton were older than the members of Joy Division, but not that much older. Everyone would have to come to grips with their maturity the hard way.

Depending on whose account you believe, Curtis's personal problems were exacerbated by the prospect of Joy Division touring America. According to Peter Hook, he was excited about leaving for the States. According to others, he was dreading the trip. The truth is, likely, a combination of the two. Curtis is portrayed as a people-pleaser, a man who would say whatever it was you wanted to hear, not least for his wife, his band, or his label boss. Rather than reconcile all of the differing promises he made to others, he let it all build to a painful tipping point. The night before Joy Division were to leave for America, Curtis hung himself.

Not surprisingly, everyone's recollection of that day is vivid. Tragedy certainly has a way of burning itself into your memory. Deborah Curtis was angry at Ian for having the "last word". Stephen Morris, Joy Division's drummer, had a reaction that was not dissimilar to the rest of the band: anger towards Curtis and disappointment in himself. He and everyone else are perfectly willing to admit that all of the red flags were there in hindsight, but they just couldn't bring them into focus at the time. The reader even gets the impression that Curtis's previous attempt at suicide didn't ring the alarm bells loud enough. To their credit, Curtis's need to please came through even during the worst of times. A simple "I'm fine" from him was enough to keep everyone rolling along, despite the fact that he was certainly not fine.

On page 304, Deborah Curtis admits that her late husband was "a very good liar, he was very convincing." It was at this point that I realized that there's room in the Joy Division universe for a book like This Searing Light, The Sun and Everything Else (the title comes from a series of words Tony Wilson throws together in a state of euphoria when describing Joy Division's sound, in case you were wondering) -- one that brings Ian Curtis back down to the status of a human being. She and many others close to Ian Curtis take turns chipping away at the Jim Morrison-sized myth that of Ian. Not to bring him down a peg, but to tell it as it was; Ian Curtis was a young man with a romantic angle, looking to channel his love of writing into a musical outlet. Life then became very, very tough as his band went on to surpass his expectations. The crowds grew as the reviews improved. Road manager and founding drummer Terry Mason puts it this way on page 316: "Everyone thinks there's some deep, dark, mystical secret, and there's not. He was a nice guy, got into a strange situation, and the only way that he would think of out at that time was to kill himself. Sorry, no secrets. Cut."


There's Room in Joy Division's Expansive Universe for Jon Savage's 'This Searing Light...' By John Garratt.  PopMatters , April 19, 2019.