'Living The Light - Robby Müller' Spotlights A Genius Cinematographer

If you’ve seen the most famous work by such renowned directors as Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, or Lars Von Trier, then chances are you’ve been exposed to the brilliant cinematography of the late Robby Müller. The subject of Claire Pijman’s impressive, but niche, new film essay “Living The Light – Robby Muller,” which just premiered at Venice, Müller was a masterful cinematographer who favored naturalistic lighting and camera movements, often creating beautiful but unshowy images that, more than anything, served the story at hand. Pijman’s film does service to Müller’s beautiful imagery by seeding her film to those images, cutting between his film work, self-shot home video, and still photography. While Pijman does include talking head interviews with his former collaborators, those who have not seen the likes of “Paris, Texas” or “Dancer In The Dark” need not apply.

Dubbed in a 2016 retrospective as the “Master of Light”, Müller began working as a camera assistant in the early ’60s, quickly meeting future collaborator Wenders. They collaborated on Wender’s first feature “Summer In The City” and worked on and off together till the 1990s. Their most famous work is the road movie “Paris, Texas.” Besides Wenders, Muller enjoyed fruitful collaborations with Jarmusch beginning with “Down by Law” through “Dead Man” and “Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai” and Lars von Trier with “Breaking The Waves” and “Dancer In The Dark.” Müller, who died just this past July, suffered vascular dementia later in his life.

All this biographical information is essentially a prerequisite to understanding Pijman’s fascination with Müller. While his painterly compositions have been compared to Vermeer and Edward Hopper, Pijman suggests this is an oversimplification of a restless visual artist who was willing to adapt his visuals to what the story needed. His stately compositions in “Paris, Texas” would eventually transition to the 360-degree handheld camera work of his von Trier collaborations. As the essay shows, Müller obsessively filmed everything (even his own family). The amount of material from his life is quite staggering, revealing a person who viewed, quite literally, everything through a lens.

All of this is to say that Müller is a fascinating subject. Yet those looking for biography are, perhaps, not the intended audience for “Living the Light.” The film essay is a little too inside-baseball for the casual moviegoer. Wenders, Jarmusch (who also helped compose the twangy score), and von Trier are much more interested in discussing individual shots or sequences than contextualizing Müller’s work and life. What biography we get is often quickly subsumed by another beautiful shot from a film. Additionally, there’s little attempt to sequence Müller’s life and work. Often we are pulled back and forth through time in a free-associative edit that can be confusing for those not fully versed with his oeuvre. When the film transitions from discussing “Paris, Texas” to “Honeysuckle Rose,” I assumed that his filmography was being discussed in a chronological order only to realize that ‘Honeysuckle’ predated ‘Paris’ by 6 years (and I only found that out after watching the entire film and going on IMDB).

Are these things a downfall of the film? I’m not so sure. One suspects there is a more conventional documentary hiding within Müller’s archive, based on the wealth of personal material he shot. But that’s not Pijman’s intention. Instead, she puts on the greatest hits and allows Müller’s beautiful images and idiosyncratic home movies to speak for themselves, something I suspect Müller would’ve wanted anyway. His life is told through the visuals that he put out into the world, and Pijman does well to respect that. I can’t think of another recent film that has allowed silence to so fully envelop scenes. Pijman may be preaching to the choir of cinephiles, but Müller’s work is so fascinating in its own right that it’s kind of okay. [B]

Check out all our coverage from the 2018 Venice Film Festival here.