Anton Corbijn Inside Out (2012)

Directed by: Klaartje Quirijns | 90 minutes | documentary

In the documentary portrait ‘Anton Corbijn Inside Out’, George Clooney plays pétanque with a large pebble, just picked up from the ground. Moments later, Lou Reed unabashedly marvels at a portrait of Lou Reed, made by the world-famous Dutch photographer. Bono had passed by before, placing one arm loosely on the door of a typical taxi, attesting to Anton’s obsession with light. All of U2 gathers in a gray neighborhood in front of a gray wall on a gray day. A moment before that, the rock band was driving around in a cocoon on wheels, shielded from everyday life. But if Anton wants that, everyone gets out. To take a picture, to become part of everyday life for a short time at the same time. In Anton’s vicinity, even the largest star becomes a tangible, knowable person again. The documentary asks how familiar Anton Corbijn actually is.

Anton Corbijn has photographed just about everyone who has been in the spotlight in recent decades, especially if they were holding a guitar or microphone. He annually traverses the earth in search of beauty, looking for frames for the heads which, Bono says here, essentially represent Corbijn himself: Miles Davis, Captain Beefheart, Isabella Rosselini. Despite all those alter egos, Corbijn calls himself a loner. A man at a distance. Rightly so, says the documentary. Here, in the film, he himself is the subject of the lens for once. But even when he is at home, in a sober living room, on the couch and the camera holds him captive in an iron frame, he remains partly out of reach. How come? It’s not what he says. His voice is open, and in his statements about himself he certainly does not hold back. It may have helped during the shooting that director Klaartje Quirijns also knew him personally. When Anton Corbijn appears next to a prince and princess to give a speech, his sentences are controlled and accurate. (But every few words he rubs a hand against one cheek, or his forehead, as if to wipe the gaze of the audience in the room.) His characteristic body language may reveal a little more, also befitting a loner: crouched slightly, as if – with his long body – he is constantly afraid of hitting his head. But his eyes see everything. When he strolls through the polder for this documentary, he looks for the most cinematic spot himself.

Quirijns has succeeded in making Corbijn much more than a busy caterer to the stars. Of course she records him during his work and his travels (like when he eats a sandwich alone in a barren gas station). But she also got him to return to the South Holland village where he grew up. Her documentary is both the excuse for and the restrained imagination of a sober search for Corbijn’s being: who is he? To answer that question, Quirijns also talks to his sister Aaf. Not in a brightly lit studio or a chic hotel room, but simply in the cozy kitchen of her Dutch home. Aaf speaks of her brother with confidential intimacy, as if between his nose and lips. How she and her brother were lonely souls even as vicars’ children. How they literally grew up next to a graveyard. Meanwhile Anton himself cuts the bread, sitting at the kitchen table. The contrast with the international heroes he photographs is only more moving when Corbijn visits his mother.

The question of who Corbijn is remains partly unanswered in ‘Inside Out’, until the end of this quest. Where the photographer Corbijn appears to have put the human being Anton somewhat oppressed, Anton Corbijn himself is also in the dark. At that point, it turns out that the lens not only gave the photographer access to the world, and to the being of other people, but also started to form a transparent barrier to what he calls ‘deep contact’. Only his photos can achieve the latter.