Pink Floyd’s “Animals” album cover is a collage featuring an oversized pig flying over London’s Battersea Power Station. While it was initially meant to be a photograph, an inflatable pig is hard to control at great heights, and the pig floated into a zone used for approaching flights to Heathrow Airport. Similarly, it was no small feat to have a person stand still while being set on fire, a task accomplished for the band’s prior album cover for “Wish You Were Here.” Another challenging feat was persuading an agitated sheep to relax on a therapist’s sofa in the exotic Hawaiian environment. This photograph was a tiny part of the original artwork for “Look Hear?,” a 10cc album.
These are just some of the stories chronicled in “Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis),” a documentary directed by Anton Corbijn (“Control”) examining the art of Hipgnosis, a British design studio that produced some of the most unconventional and innovative art ever to appear on albums. The firm operated between 1968 and the mid-1980s. The name “Hipgnosis” was created by combining the words “hip” and “gnostic,” and saying it like “hypnosis.”
“Squaring the Circle” has the atmosphere of an official portrait, with Aubrey Powell, who founded Hipgnosis with Storm Thorgerson, serving as the primary voice among the interviewees who are mainly friends and colleagues. The visuals, including contemporary footage in black and white and many photographs from Hipgnosis’s heyday, are stunning.
Structurally, the film highlights the creation of one idea or collaboration after another. Powell remarks that receiving a call from a Beatle was akin to receiving a call from God. “Squaring the Circle” is polished and engaging, but like the firm it covers, it’s also a niche product, and the recollections become a little repetitious as the film progresses.
Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters.
