Celebrated cinematographer Robby Müller, best known for his work on films by Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and Lars von Trier, has died at 78. Dutch publication Het Parool reports that he died at his home in Amsterdam, after several years of vascular dementia which left him unable to talk or move independently.
In a Twitter post Jarmusch said: “We have lost the remarkable, brilliant & irreplaceable Robby Müller. I love him so very much. He taught me so many things, & without him, I don’t think I would know anything about filmmaking.”
Born in Curaçao (then part of the Netherlands Antilles) in 1940, Müller was described in the Guardian as “one of the greatest film artists of the last half-century”. After studying at the Netherlands Film Academy, Müller was apprenticed to cinematographer Gerard Vandenberg and worked as a camera assistant on a number of his features in Holland and Germany. Müller graduated to director of photography on short films – one of which, Alabama (2000 Light Years) was for a Munich Film School student called Wim Wenders.
Wenders’ first feature, Summer in the City, was also Müller’s first: they would go on to make 10 films together, as well as part of Beyond the Clouds, Michelangelo Antonioni’s final feature for which Wenders acted as standby. In them Müller developed an atmospheric, observational style, complementing Wenders’ interest in retro pop culture and roadtrip-style wanderings. Arguably their most successful collaboration was Paris, Texas, which won the Cannes Palme d’Or in 1984; however, it was their Patricia Highsmith adaptation, The American Friend, which cemented their international reputation on its release in 1977.
The latter film led to invitations from major-league American film-makers, and Müller worked on films for Peter Bogdanovich (Saint Jack, They All Laughed) and William Friedkin (To Live and Die in LA). Müller also worked on English-language films for younger, hipper film-makers: Repo Man for Alex Cox, and Down by Law for Jim Jarmusch. It was with the latter he became particularly associated, shooting Mystery Train, Dead Man and Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai.
Müller had himself by the mid-90s become a major-league figure, being nominated regularly for awards (though never for the Oscars). He became known for a light-footed, handheld style – employed to stunning effect on Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves in 1996 – and as a pioneer of digital cinematography, helping Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark to a Palme d’Or in 2000.
Müller’s final full-feature credit was Michael Winterbottom’s music industry comedy 24 Hour Party People in 2002; he also filmed Steve McQueen’s artwork Carib’s Leap in Grenada in the same year (the unused footage from which McQueen created another film, Ashes, which first emerged in 2004).
Müller is survived by his wife Andrea, a magazine picture editor; they were married in 1993.
