Robby Muller

Cinematographer

April 4, 1940

July 4, 2018

WHEN Robby Muller, the Dutch cinematographer who has died aged 78, was given a retrospective exhibition in Amsterdam in 2016 the show was given the title “Master of Light.”

It was the perfect summary of Muller’s contribution to contemporary cinema. From the start of the 1970s into the 21st century, Muller brought a fresh, punchy visual style to the screen while working with directors such as Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and Michelangelo Antonioni.

As a result, Muller was responsible for the look of some of the most memorable films of the last 40 years. His CV takes in Paris, Texas, Down by Law, Repo Man, Breaking the Waves and 24 Hour Party People.

In later years he also embraced the emerging digital cameras for Danish enfant terrible Lars von Trier on Dancer in the Dark. “You get the Robby Muller feel anyway,” von Trier said of the result.

With a penchant for Arriflex cameras and Cooke and Zeiss lenses and fast film stock, Muller excelled shooting in both black and white and colour. “He’s definitely a Dutch interior painter,” Jarmusch once said of Muller. But it was his use of natural lighting that made his name.

Born in Curaçao (then part of the Netherlands Antilles) in 1940, Muller studied at the Netherlands Film Academy. At the end of the 1960s he began to work as a camera assistant in Holland and Germany where he teamed up with Wim Wenders on whose films Muller made his name.

“We would dream it up a little bit, the atmosphere of the film, and then I would leave it completely to Robby to find the light,” Wenders said of their work together.

Their work together culminated in Paris, Texas, which won the Palme D’Or in 1984.

It was an earlier Wenders film, however, The American Friend, that attracted attention in Hollywood and led Muller to work with Peter Bogdanovich on Saint Jack and Jerry Schatzberg on Honeysuckle Rose.

“After my first film in Hollywood, I could have been booked out for a year, maintained myself there, got a Green Card, joined the union. But it’s not really my world,” Muller would say.

And yet America kept calling him back. “He had this great foreigner’s eye for the States, particularly the West Coast, and it was so fresh,” pointed out William Friedkin who worked with Muller on the 1985 film To Live and Die in LA. “He wasn’t shooting cliches. He captured all those details usually overlooked in American films.”

Those details ensured that even minor films (John McNaughton’s Mad Dog and Glory springs to mind) were worth catching for Muller’s eye for American neon and street life.

Indeed, Muller’s films were often a symphony of saturated, though never overstated, colour. His compositions were never cluttered nor loud and never lost sight of the characters at the heart of the story.

“When I choose to work on a film,” Muller once said, “the most important thing to me is that it is about human feelings. I try to work with directors who want their films to touch the audience, and make people discuss what the film was about long after they have left the cinema."

Muller’s last significant job was as director of photography for the British film 24 Hour Party People in 2002. In his final years he suffered from vascular dementia and tragically, his illness meant he was unable to talk or even move independently.

Müller is survived by his wife Andrea, a magazine picture editor.

TEDDY JAMIESON