MIFF Session 6 : SQUARING THE CIRCLE

What's your favourite album cover? Hang on, that will depend on your age. You might not have one. Ok, I'll start. The Beatles' Revolver: cartoon collage as creepy as it is appealing. Ok, Never Mind the Bollocks: iconoclasm in yellow and hot pink. Yeah, it's probably that. However, if I'm honest I'll have to admit that I did find record covers before that one could be trippy or even assaultive through their enigmatic juxtapostions of old and modern imagery. Some were like undeclared puzzles, daring you to even ask questions of them. By the time punk came around I'd only had about two years to think about this before I was rejecting it all as the work of dinosaur artists who'd somehow dodged the asteroid. But, through all that there was a name I noticed on every cover that stopped me long enough to read the credits: Hipgnosis. If you know anything about the way records looked in the '70s you knew that name.

Anton Corbijn's documentary on the partnership that went by it is absorbing and thrilling. The Uni friends who found the cool people in their native Cambridge ended up befriending the band that would become Pink Floyd. There's dispute but it is supposed by some that it was the mighty obscurity Syd Barret himself who formed the portmanteau that collided trances with two terms for being aware. And Pink Floyd would look very naked without the work of Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson, two hip gnostics who clung to the scene until their brash ideas got them wowing anyone who walked into a record shop.

Corbijn who made the fiction film that surpassed the documentary on Joy Division keeps things fluent and fast with industry anecdotes as well as a lot of compelling discussion by players and witnesses about why the tiny firm of designers created a decade's look and feel as applied to its music. As Floyd and Zeppelin took to ever larger stadiums and their concepts ever more cosmic, Hipgnosis were there to design a sculptural presence for an album by that name for Led Zep or apply a cheeky idea about lush meaninglessness for Floyd's Atom Heart Mother. There is no shortage of stories to delight the old faithful or even more to fuel some Gen X hate-watching (especially when punk bursts in). Corbijn keeps it, ironically enough, quite punky with a Julien Temple-like lightness, even when the commentary needs to darken.

The overall effect is that the flood of information in this guided tour through the work of these visionaries is kept easily digestible. Storm Thorgerson is represented by archival audio and video and Aubrey (Po) Powell is present for recollection. There is a host of witnesses such as members of Led Zeppelin, Paul MacCartney, Peter Gabriel and others who, quite enjoyably, speak as customers. 

But this is the film of one who made his name as a photographer in the shellshocked post-punk years when the sounds turned industrial or unclassifiably bleak. Corbijn elicits the aid of a very astutely chosen Peter Saville to comment from the standpoint of one who admired Hipgnosis art but was able to apply his own contrasting ideas in response. He's not only ready to celebrate Thorgerson and Powell but to clarify why his own iconic artwork for Factory records formed a baton-passing.

Before I got those records by 10CC, Led Zeppelin or Peter Gabriel in the '70s I was a classical nerd. Once I hit 13 and really had to reassess that, at least in the open, I did come into the close reading that only a teenager from that time could do. And I saw a kind of cinema forming beyond the 12X12 square of the sleeves that offered worlds fuelled by the music that projected well into the big starry void fillable only with imagination. It was art like this that did that. This documentary that tells that tale is joyous. Not without a few tears, mind, but joyous all the same.