The crystalline reissue of Down by Law this week offers us the chance to reacquaint ourselves with one of the greatest film artists of the last half-century. And no, I don’t mean Jim Jarmusch.

Jarmusch’s work has lost a great deal of the appeal it had for me when I first encountered him at the cold, unpromising dawn of the 1980s. As time wore on, I found less and less to love, coming finally to believe that Jarmusch’s work was more about his own ironic relationship to his own material than anything inherently fascinating in his often barely-there narratives. So I haven’t returned to his work much, and hadn’t seen Down By Law since the late 80s.

Why not? I don’t care for Roberto Benigni and I never did. But reacquaintance brought me back to the cinematography of Robby Müller – a Dutchman, appropriately, given his mastery of light – with his high-contrast black-and-white images, fast stocks, his fondness for natural light and his very simple technical palette (he has used Arriflex cameras and Cooke and Zeiss lenses for most of his career, but he throttles no end of magic out of them like Jarmusch’s other pal Neil Young does with his legendary ancient Les Paul, Old Black).

Jarmusch inherited Müller from Wim Wenders when the latter was mired at Zoetrope in the early 80s. With Wenders he had set back-to-back benchmarks in black-and-white and colour photography with Kings Of The Road and The American Friend. As with Jarmusch, all the love has gone out of my young man’s idolatry of Wenders’s early output, but there is still Müller, still imperishable.

In the first, the monochrome makes every image hum in lost and mournful ways; in the latter, colour is an overwhelming presence: the reds are a Godardian scarlet by way of austere Antonioni – whose last movie, Beyond The Clouds, Müller also shot.

Perhaps because he was born in the colonial Dutch Antilles and didn’t see Holland until he was 13 in 1953, Müller makes a good outsider, seeing things the habituated locals miss, the way JG Ballard saw England’s foreignness. Müller had practised his outsider’s eye in America in sublime monochrome in Wenders’s Alice In The Cities, and in the blazing Southwestern colours of Paris, Texas, so when America called, he was ready. His informal LA trilogy, Repo Man, To Live And Die In LA and Barfly, are city symphonies that partake of Müller’s thirst for night-time, neon and moving cars, renewing our stale ideas about the most photographed, least understood city in the west.



His work is a one-man weekend-long home film festival. He has worked for Von Trier several times, for Bogdanovich twice (including Saint Jack), for André Téchiné, Michael Winterbottom and Raúl Ruiz.

Do yourself a favour: Meet Robby Müller all over again. It’s worth it.