Sigur Rós: Inni
So, yesterday I sat down in my darkened living room to watch Sigur Rós’ latest optical output, the concert movie Inni. First of all: this is not Heima. No images of the guys playing in Sleipnir’s hoofprint here – there’s no Icelandic landscape at all. The show was filmed at London’s Alexandra Palace in 2008, and it’s completely black and white. The film very much focuses on the performance of single bandmembers, shots of the audience and the whole stage are few and far between, and besides the monochrome coloring also uses distorted images of background animations and instruments to further fragment the viewing experience. It feels very abstract – even though the cameras are on stage with the band, the viewer is clearly not. The songs are interspersed with unsorted snippets from interviews dating from the nineties and early noughties, the only specks of paint in the whole movie.
Music-wise, it’s the best-of setlist one would expect of Sigur Rós in 2011 (or 2008, for that matter) – songs from all releases including Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust . Despite the bleak look, the sound is very much the live-sound, including audience applause, and drum-heavy tracks like Sæglópur and Popplagið are much more livelier and have a raw feeling, especially when the camera is close to Orri’s cymbals. There also is a new song running over the end credits called Lúppulagið.
All in all, the film did not convince me – a concert movie should either have a narrative and substory like Heima (or Spinal Tap) or show the musicians up close on stage with sweat running and bleeding fingertips. Sigur Rós is not Arcade Fire, but the one thing that always fascinated me is the massive wall of sound they produce playing live, and sadly the movie does not transport this to my living room. I’ll try to catch one of the many cinema-screenings of Inni – maybe my shabby couch and small laptop did not do justice to the movie. On DVD, it looks like a 1920s newsreel with better sound.
Sigur Rós: Festival (Live) from Sigur Rós on Vimeo.
