LIVING THE LIGHT - ROBBY MÜLLER
a documentary by Claire Pijman
Robby Müller is one of the few people in the world who knows how to play the sun. How to catch its rays like butterflies. How to strike its beams like chords. Not only does music reverberate and resonate from these tenderly spun threads of light, as we can see and hear in the opening images of Living the Light when Robby moves his camera, the camera turns into a musical instrument as well. And the whole world dances, radiates, is illuminated.
For her extraordinary film essay, Living the Light, Director and Director of Photography Claire Pijman had access to the thousands of Hi8 video diaries, pictures and Polaroids that Müller photographed while he was at work on one of the more than 70 features he shot throughout his career; often with long term collaborators such as Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and Lars von Trier. The film intertwines these images with excerpts of his oeuvre, thus creating a fluid and cinematic continuum. In his score for Living the Light Jim Jarmusch gives this wide raging scale of life and art an additional musical voice.
It discloses how life and work and art and life again were always inspiring and informing one another. One continuous stream of expressive yet sensitive images that show how the world is best seen through a camera. How the world comes to life (and lives) through a lens. How the roads and hotel rooms he filmed with Wim Wenders were his roads and hotel rooms. How his surroundings travelled from one medium into another. His true destination was always portrayal, revealing what he saw. And in those rooms and on those roads he was drawn to the most reflective of surfaces: windows and mirrors, resulting in an endless flow of self-portraits of the cinematographer as a man with a camera.
With his ground-breaking camerawork, and inventive and innovative lighting methods, his exceptional sense for the depth of colour, and the freedom of framing, plus his on-going quest for si
