Occasionally film projects come together where the director and the subject are so perfectly matched as to have been designed by God. This documentary about the graphic design house Hipgnosis was made by Anton Corbijn, who has already directed many well-regarded music videos as well as narrative features about British musicians like Ian Curtis, but he started as a still photographer who specialized in pop music artists, and Hipgnosis is by far the most influential album cover creator in the history of British rock, having created iconic graphics for Led Zeppelin, 10cc, Peter Gabriel, and, most relevantly, Pink Floyd, who gave them their start. Corbijn honors the company’s legacy by serving up a visually lush presentation in silvery black-and-white. 

The Hipgnosis story is told on film by Aubrey “Po” Powell, who founded the company with his partner, the late Storm Thorgeson, in the late 1960s, mostly be accident. Involved in the London acid scene as students, they lived for a while in a kind of “colony” with friends, some of whom would go on to form Pink Floyd, including Syd Barrett, who famously flamed out on LSD and quit the band after its second album, A Saucerful of Secrets, whose cover was Hipgnosis’s first commission, and a startlingly famous one. Thorgeson was the arrogant brains of the outfit (one substantial montage features famous people going on about how difficult he was to work with) while Powell, who studied photography at Thorgeson’s insistence, was its creative facilitator, and after the pair started getting more work that challenged the very idea of album art (Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother is touted as the first major album that included no mention of the band or title on the cover, an idea that scandalized the record company) they kept going further and further, an artistic trajectory that would mirror the capitalist triumph of major label rock in the 70s. Consequently, Hipgnosis’s ideas became ridiculously expensive, as Powell admits several times. Those were the days, as it were.

Corbijn knows what the audience for this type of film demands, and it’s chock full of anecdotes of how some famous covers came together, told not only by Powell and Thorgeson, who died in 2013, but by big names like Jimmy Page, Paul McCartney, and Roger Waters, the kinds of stars who know that Corbijn can be relied upon to make them look very good, regardless of what they say. As counterpoint, there are occasional insert comments by Noel Gallagher, who mourns the loss of the striking album cover with the demise of the LP, complaining pointedly that the artwork for Oasis’s biggest selling album is a piece of crap that can never be redeemed. For once, Noel’s honesty shines through in a correctly self-deprecating manner.

Opens Feb. 7 in Tokyo at Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831). 

Squaring the Circle home page in Japanese

photo (c) Cavalier Films Ltd.