OK, OK. You’ve stated your position clearly

It was good to read your obituary of Malcolm Whitehead in MOJO 314. However, your account of his Super 8 film of Joy Division seems awry. Contrary to what you state, Malcolm’s film was completed, and screened in several important venues. It premiered in A Factory Flick (FAC 9), a group of short films including Charles Salem’s Joy Division film, on September 13, 1979, at London’s Scala Cinema. In March 1980 it appeared at the Berlin Film Festival.

It is also incorrect to say the band objected to the “inclusion of Police Chief James Anderton and elements of the Nuremberg rallies”. I was present at a private pre-release screening for Joy Division – the first time the band and their manager, Rob Gretton, had seen it and, far from objecting, they were impressed by it.

It is true Rob was bothered by the use of Nazi metaphor to attack Anderton, but when he put this to the vote, the band as a whole decided that the use of the images were OK. Anderton was using his police force to suppress youth culture in Manchester, and was intensely disliked for this.

A committed socialist, Malcolm was drawing a Nazi parallel. His film provided an opportunity to say something wider about bureaucracy’s sinister side and – Malcolm’s lifelong main concern – the use of technology as a means of social control. To dismiss his film as being uncompleted because of the band’s objections is to dismiss an important first film redolent of the social and political tensions of the times – which Joy Division’s music evoked.

The full story of this film – and much more about Malcolm too – is in my book, The Blue Monday Diaries: In The Studio With New Order.

Michael Butterworth, via e-mail