Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn began his career in the mid-1970s as the opportunistic chronicler of local enfant terrible Herman Brood. His stark, still, monochrome portraiture soon found favour with Anglophone rockerati: Corbijn has been the creative director for U2 and Depeche Mode for some three decades, in-between snapping duties for Joy Division, Metallica, Nick Cave and REM.
Corbijn’s career as the film director of Control and The American is a logical extension of his work as a shutterbug; every frame is a carefully composed tableau defined by an almost anti-cinematic sense of stately motionlessness.
This documentary portrait is billed as an intimate study boasts extraordinary access to the set of The American and Corbijn’s celebrity chums. Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore turns up with the belief that his combo wasn’t viewed seriously until they were viewed through Corbijn’s lens; Bono still hopes to become the Bono from Anton Corbijn pictures.
Away from the showbiz, director Klaartje Quirijns, an investigative film-maker sets out to find what makes Corbijn tick. Her thesis posits loneliness as a superpower. She follows him back to his hometown to discuss his isolation as the rock-worshipping son of a pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church.
Quirijns’s intrusions make for interesting juxtaposition. Her elusive, workaholic subject, unlike the images he produces, is always in motion. When he isn’t running between high-profile assignments, he
shows little enthusiasm for psychological excavations. The director’s willingness to use indifferently lit, on-the-hoof interviews provides an aesthetic shock set beside Corbijn’s highly stylised milieu.
In the end, Inside Out is an interesting failure. Quirijns, even with her subject’s full co-operation, gleans only a little more than the makers of 2010’s Shadow Play: The Making of Anton Corbijn.
Perhaps that's as it should be. After all, Corbijn could never have produced such iconic images if he weren't perennially obscured by his own camera. Quirijns strives to find drama in the Corbijn story but the greatest tension here is a dramatic irony: Corbijn understands the value of the superficial even if his chronicler does not. TARA BRADY
