When cinema audiences think of the desolate grandeur of Wim Wenders’s existential road movies or the stark, corroded aesthetic of Jim Jarmusch’s deadpan comedies, they are usually calling to mind images from the work of the Dutch cinematographer who helped shape those film-makers’ visions: Robby Müller, who has died aged 78.
Müller had an unorthodox preference for the medium shot and long take over the close-up and the rapid-fire cut; this, along with his flexibility and his attentive and unusual use of light, earned the admiration of directors including Lars von Trier, Raul Ruíz, Sally Potter, Steve McQueen and Michael Winterbottom. The most apparently unpromising locations grew magical through his lens. The high-contrast monochrome in Jarmusch’s New Orleans-set Down By Law (1986), the first of their four features together, provided a sense of definition which sometimes eluded the characters themselves.
He transformed a string of sleazy dive bars into iridescent catacombs for Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly (1987), based on the life of Charles Bukowski, and he used dynamic handheld 35mm cinematography to draw out the warmth as well as the wildness from a religiously austere community in Von Triers’s harrowing Breaking the Waves (1995).
It was with Wenders, though, that he cut his teeth and made his mark. “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,” said the director. They worked on and off for more than 25 years on features that filtered the mythology of American culture, its rock’n’roll, its fashion and its violence, through a prism of European alienation. These included The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972), Alice in the Cities (1974), Kings of the Road (1976) and The American Friend (1977), an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel Ripley’s Game starring Dennis Hopper as the amoral Tom Ripley.
Paris, Texas (1984), a dreamy modern take on The Searchers co-written by Sam Shepard and haunted by the ghosts of the American west, was Wenders’s masterpiece, and it showed Müller at his most entrancingly poetic. “He’s like some kind of Dutch interior painter from the Vermeer or de Hooch kind of school, that just got born in the wrong century,” observed Jarmusch.
The son of a Shell engineer, Müller was born in Curaçao, which was at that time a Dutch colony, but grew up in Indonesia and did not see the Netherlands until he was 13, when his family moved to Amsterdam. After studying cinematography at the Netherlands Film Academy, he relocated to Germany, where he met Wenders. Their collaboration on the 1969 short Alabama (2000 Light Years) led to Müller shooting the director’s debut feature, Summer in the City (1970).
Though their work together consumed much of Müller’s career, it also brought him to the attention of US directors, including Peter Bogdanovich, for whom he shot Saint Jack (1979) and They All Laughed (1981). He had numerous offers from Hollywood, but generally steered clear of the American mainstream, with occasional exceptions: John Schlesinger’s daft voodoo horror The Believers (1987) or the comedy-drama Mad Dog and Glory (1993) with Robert De Niro and Bill Murray.
It was his outsider’s eye which made him such an insightful chronicler of American life in films such as the scuzzy punk comedy Repo Man (1984), directed by another outsider, Alex Cox, who exclaimed: “The mise en scène is Robby Müller! He had these opinions at the time – he didn’t like to move the camera unless it was necessary, he preferred medium shots to close-ups, he liked to play things in master shots if it was possible, and I just went along with Robby’s aesthetic.”
The thriller To Live and Die in LA (1985) seems uncharacteristic at first of Müller yet contains some of his most indelible imagery with its smoggy sunsets, its colours as jaded and jaundiced as the characters. “I’d seen and admired his work, especially in Paris, Texas, and that was the look I wanted,” said the picture’s director, William Friedkin. “He had this great foreigner’s eye for the States, particularly the West Coast, and it was so fresh. He wasn’t shooting cliches. He captured all those details usually overlooked in American films … He loved backlighting with the sun, and using very little coverage, and it suited the film perfectly.”
Müller never lost his appetite for innovation, whether shooting the musical numbers of Von Trier’s Palme d’Or-winning Dancer in the Dark (2000) with 100 stationary digital cameras or roaming around Manchester on the hoof for 24 Hour Party People (2002), Winterbottom’s recreation of the city’s music scene over three decades. In 2016, he was honoured with an exhibition at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, which argued for him to be accorded the same status as any director.
He is survived by his wife, Andrea, a photo editor, and their son, Jim, and by a daughter, Camilla, from a previous marriage.
• Robby Müller, cinematographer, born 4 April 1940; died 4 July 2018
