Robby Muller: Living the Light

Director of Photography Robby Muller 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. When Robby moves his camera, the camera turns into a musical instrument. And the whole world dances, radiates, is illuminated. For her extraordinary film essay Director and DoP Claire Pijman had access to Muller's personal archive: thousands of Hi8 video diaries, personal pictures and Polaroids that Muller photographed 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. With his ground-breaking camerawork, inventive lighting methods, his exceptional sense for the depth of colour, and the freedom of framing, plus his on-going quest for simplicity, he has encouraged generations of DoPs to discover their own eye. Besides being a master of the analogue, Muller became a pioneer of the digital when he shot his first features with Lars von Trier. His work has been compared to that of painters like Vermeer and Hopper, like him, also masters of light. But even when his films are finished, his images keep on moving. The light never fades. Because he has always created space for the human story to speak through the images. To come into the light. Living the Light - Robby Muller is the story of that light.