SQUARING THE CIRCLE is a straightforward history of a deeply weird art studio
Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)
Directed by Anton Corbijn
Written by Trish D. Chetty
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour, 41 minutes
Opens Wednesday in New York at Film Forum, expands nationwide June 20
by Alex Rudolph, Contributor
If I put together a list of my fifty favorite albums of the past decade, I'd probably only be able to tell you who designed the cover art of four or five of them. These are records I've listened to hundreds of times, sleeves I've looked at just as often, but the covers, often the first part of an album I experience, are put together by people whose names I don't always know. But I know Hipgnosis, the weirdos whose prog, metal and classic rock album covers were as iconic as the music they advertised, and as often as I like a Hipgnosis cover, I'm left wondering what the hell I'm looking at. Anton Corbijn, himself a legendary artist who had a serious impact on the art of the album cover, tries to dig into the studio's history in his new documentary Squaring the Circle, delivering a surprisingly straightforward chronology of the most famous people to ever take a photo of a cow's ass.
Hipgnosis, we learn, was primarily a partnership between Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell. Storm's the more recognizable name, but Aubrey, primarily known as "Po," was the photographer who brought Storm's ideas into the real world. Storm died in 2013 but Po is still active and the film opens with him pulling their most famous works from a portfolio. Everything's shot in black and white but the art is in color, immediately contrasting Corbijn's style (grounded, monochromatic) with Hipgnosis' (psychedelic, extravagant). Their work shares a striking sparseness, but that's about it, and the idea of observing one style through the lens of its diametric opposite is an interesting choice. Corbijn clearly admires the work and it's a pleasure to watch anything he shoots, but I never in a million years would have pegged him as the person to take this subject on.
Po tells most of the story, with assists from archival footage of Storm and new interviews with his peers and the bands he worked with (plus Hipgnosis fan Noel Gallagher). The talking heads in Squaring the Circle are as notable as anybody you're going to see interviewed in a music documentary, with Peter Gabriel, Paul McCartney and the surviving members of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin showing up to talk about working with the studio. Peter Saville and Roger Dean, the other iconic album artists of the era, are on hand. These are people who have, between them, given a million interviews, and they know how to tell a story. Luckily, they actually do that, rather than just sit around going "And wow, that was a good album cover, wasn't it?"
Storm and Po knew Pink Floyd from the beginning, when they were all students in Cambridge. Hipgnosis couldn't have predicted where Pink Floyd would go and how big they'd get, but the opposite is also true, and there's a real sense from all parties that they each benefitted from the other's success. Po recognizes that the reputation of the art on an album like Dark Side of the Moon is bolstered immensely by its status as one of the best-selling records of all time, but that prism probably wouldn't be on t-shirts in Target in 2023 if it wasn't so sharp. The commerce side of sleeve designs is always part of why these things take off or don't, and Corbijn does a good job recognizing that this isn't art for art's sake, but a tool to sell product. You can do wild things with it, but it's still a tool. And sometimes the musicians get lucky. I don't want to pit album covers against music but I think it's clear the Wish You Were Here cover and interior art is a much more striking and elegant expression of the album's themes than "Welcome to the Machine" or "Have a Cigar" are.
As with any story that mentions Syd Barrett, there are discussions of LSD, and there's nothing more boring or self-indulgent than a person describing how they felt when they were on drugs. There's a little of that here, with rapturous explanations of the times LSD opened interviewees' minds. Quickly, though, it turns queasy-- Storm and Po each had bad trips and Barrett essentially lost his mind. That's the story, you can't get away from it, but it's also so refreshing to watch a documentary about rock and roll excess and not have to hear old hippies brag about shooting up or eating handfuls of acid or whatever. In some ways, Storm and Po lived the lives you'd expect documentary subjects to live-- they made work, got acclaim, had differences and split up-- but the movie never feels cliched because their version of wild living involves, say, not having a toilet in the studio, forcing everybody to pee in the sink. An AI trained on Behind the Music episodes couldn't have written this.
And, again, their dynamic worked as these things tend to, where one partner wants to push the envelope further and further (Storm) and the other needs to remind him of the fiscal realities of making their work. The joy in hearing it recounted is realizing the more conservative partner was still flying out to the Sahara and inflating 60 soccer balls on sand dunes. After a few proven successes, record labels started giving carte blanche and essentially unlimited resources to these two (and, eventually, their staffers, including greats like Peter Christofferson from Throbbing Gristle, Coil, et al.). I had never thought much about the cover(s) for Led Zeppelin's In Through The Out Door, but I'd assumed it was shot in a random English pub. It turns out Hipgnosis found a grungy New Orleans bar, fully recreated it in London and then took photos for the album art there.
When it came time to make a cover for 10cc's Look Hear?, Hipgnosis wanted a photo of a sheep on a psychiatrist's couch in the water. For some reason, that had to be in Hawaii. After flying to Hawaii, they had to find a sheep and a couch, which wasn't easy, but was at least less intense than trying to get the sheep they found to stay still as the waves freaked it out. Once the pictures were taken, it was decided the image would be shrunk down to the size of a postage stamp and flanked by big text (that didn't communicate the artist or album title).
What does the sheep mean? What's the significance of the transposed bar? These are statement pieces and Po is upfront that the statement was sometimes "We were given a lot of money." It's funny, and Po is a great storyteller, but you do wish there was more footage of Storm, the self-described ideas man, explaining his thought processes. Po is the perfect subject for a Corbijn doc in that he's matter-of-fact and ready to talk in real terms, but not actually hearing much from Storm negates any chance of analysis.
But that's Squaring the Circle: it's about Hipgnosis' complicated work, told in uncomplicated terms. It's also just Hipgnosis, which is an unconventional choice when so many documentaries are padded out to tell everybody's entire histories. Before Hipgnosis, there was great album cover work by Reid Miles and Francis Wolff at Blue Note, but the movie isn't about the before, and after Hipgnosis there was Houston's Pen & Pixel, who are their heirs in some weird way, and Robert Beatty, who's doing illustrations that look inspired by Hipgnosis, but the movie isn't about the after. We learn that Storm stayed in London during the studio's later years because his wife left him with their son, but that's about all the personal detail given on either one of the group's founders.
I liked that Corbijn included Peter Saville and Sex Pistols' Glen Matlock discussing how irrelevant Pink Floyd was to them. Punk and post-punk spoke personally to young people in a way prog maybe wasn't and Saville, whose work with Factory did as much to define post-punk's visual aesthetic as anything, notes that Hipgnosis was intrinsically linked to the things newer kinds of music were pushing against. Storm and Po were bound to become less sought after as industry trends changed. What's most interesting to me here is that Anton Corbijn was part of that movement. His work with U2 and Depeche Mode especially helped usher Hipgnosis out the door, whether he meant to or not. Corbijn was shooting Joy Division shows for NME and photographing the cover of The Joshua Tree. If you see a black-and-white picture of a band in the 80s or 90s, there's a very good chance Corbijn took it. And I'm not itching to watch more directors insert themselves into their own documentaries about other people, but I would have loved to get a better sense of the transition from Hipgnosis' latter-day maximalism to Saville and Corbijn's minimalism.
The 80s hit and new wave and two-tone took over England with their own styles and those bands didn't have much use for elaborately planned photos of stuntmen on fire on Hollywood backlots. Feeling irrelevance creep in, Storm wanted to stop working on album art and become a film and video director, though he went so over-budget on projects that Hipgnosis collapsed less than two years after the pivot to movies. Po didn't speak to Storm for 12 years. "It was a tragedy," he says. "All the good things we'd done for 15, 17 years were fucked. Absolutely fucked." He breaks down crying, "Wish You Were Here" plays, we see a picture of Storm and Po laughing, Po walks down a desolate path with the portfolio from the beginning of the film and the credits roll. I initially wished the film had gone into what the two men went on to create, but the ending of the partnership was sudden. The film's ending feels appropriate as a focused document on Hipgnosis. And that's how these things happen. Big creative collaborations end and everybody's left wondering what happened and if things could have gone differently. Pink Floyd and 10cc splintered dramatically after tensions had built up for years. John Bonham drank himself to death and Led Zeppelin didn't replace him. If you wanted to go into Storm's later album covers, where he made some good work but mostly recycled old ideas and insisted on putting big things in sparse, plain locations over and over (and there were more examples I could have used from this trend I've never seen anybody talk about), you might teach me something, but you might also get away from the point that Hipgnosis were a group of designers making unprecedented weirdness with money no record company will ever willingly part with again.