New Order

The catalogue opens with a Joy Division song. "Ceremony" was written before Ian Curtis died in 1980 and recorded afterwards by the three musicians who were left, which makes it both an ending and a first single.

What follows is a videography made almost entirely by people who did not make music videos for a living. Robert Breer, an experimental animator born in 1926, hand-drew the animation for "Blue Monday" together with the photographer William Wegman — though not for the 1983 original, which never got a video at all. Robert Longo, a visual artist, made "Bizarre Love Triangle" in 1986. Charles Sturridge, two years after directing the BBC's Brideshead Revisited, shot "Confusion" in a New York club in 1983. And Philippe Decouflé, a choreographer, made "True Faith" in 1987 — the one with the costumes and the mimed slapping, still the video most people picture when they hear the band.

Two of the hires only look ordinary in hindsight. Jonathan Demme shot "The Perfect Kiss" in 1985 as an eleven-minute run-through in the band's own rehearsal room, played and recorded live rather than mimed to the single, seven years before he won an Academy Award for directing The Silence of the Lambs. Two years after that, Kathryn Bigelow made "Touched by the Hand of God" — twenty-three years before she became the first woman to win the same award. Both were brought in by Michael Shamberg, the producer who handled the band's videos and kept reaching outside the industry to fill them.

The pattern held into the 2000s. Johan Renck took the last two videos here, "Crystal" in 2001 and "Krafty" in 2005, and went on to win an Emmy for directing Chernobyl.

Three directors in this archive later won major awards for work with no connection to music, and the rest came from animation, dance and fine art. For a band that let a designer own its record sleeves, hiring outside the trade was never a gimmick. It was the house style.