Master of light : Robby Müller Cinematographer

"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"

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.

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