Celebrity Biographies
Robby Muller
When you look at the list of filmmakers Robby Müller has worked with, you can immediately see that he was not your average artist.
There are no super-commercial names on that list, and this is not a snobby stance, but rather a special sensibility of this “master of light”, the best known of all Dutch cinematographers. He assured Müller that “when I choose to work on a film, the most important thing for me is that it deals with human feelings. I try to work with directors who want their movies to influence audiences, and to get people talking about what the movie is about long after they’ve left the room.”
This profoundly humanist artist was born in Curaçao, in the Netherlands Antilles, in 1940. In the 1960s, she studied at the Amsterdam Film and Television Academy. She was talented, and right away she was able to take up photography as an operator’s assistant, and make some shorts in 1965.
The filmmaker to whose career his name is most closely linked is that of the German Wim Wenders . In 1972 he took the photograph of The goalkeeper’s fear before the penalty , and many more titles would follow, some as important as Alice in the Cities (1974), False Movement (1975), The American Friend (1977) -with the pictorial reference of Edward Hopper’s paintings– and Paris, Texas (1984) – where according to Wenders the shared option was “to attack without aesthetic models, without a Walker Evans or an Edward Hopper, our motto was: not a single reference to the cinema, we were going to face the landscape”–.
But there is more. With Jim Jarmusch he will do Under the Weight of the Law (1986), Mystery Train (1989), Dead Man (1995) or Ghost Dog. The way of the samurai (1999). Jarmusch assured that with him “I have learned many things, about making movies, about life in general, about light, and about recording and capturing things that happen at the moment, and trusting my instincts.”
It is brilliant, both in black and white – for Andrzej Wajda he made the wonderful Korczak (1990), about the Nazi death camps, which undoubtedly influenced Janusz Kaminski in Spielberg ‘s Schindler’s List – and in color – Living and to die in Los Angeles , by William Friedkin–, nothing resists him; but I use one or the other, it is always an aesthetic choice, not whimsical or commercial.
The Danish Lars Von Trier will take advantage of his talent in essential titles of his filmography, such as Breaking the Waves (1996) and Dancing in the Dark (2000). Another international notch in her work is the New Zealander Sally Potter , for whom she photographs The Tango Lesson (1997).
Müller’s last feature film was Michael Winterbottom ‘s 24 Hour Party People (2002) . His health was seriously deteriorated by vascular dementia, Binswanger’s disease, and in fact he could not attend to receive the award that his colleagues from the ASC (the American Association of Cinematographers) awarded him in 2013, Wim Wenders would represent him in an act held later in Amsterdam. He is survived by his wife Andrea.