The arty, spare Inni follows Iceland's Sigur Ros

Related Content

• Courtney Wilson: I'd like to see more community
  April 13, 2012
• Desperately seeking Radiohead tickets: A Craigslist compilation
  March 13, 2012
• What if Radiohead's song were all about sex?
  March 8, 2012
• Jesse Tabish of Other Lives: "There were about thirty people and half of Radiohead there"
  March 13, 2012
• Civil Twilight
  April 19, 2012

More About

• Vincent Morisset
• Sigur Ros
• Arcade Fire
• Indie Rock and Indie Pop
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Fellow anthemic NPR darlings Arcade Fire and Radiohead might fiercely divide public opinion, but there aren't a lot of Sigur Rós haters: People either love the Icelandic post-rock band or are content to let their ethereal sounds fade into the background. It follows that there probably aren't going to be a lot of people who dislike Inni, the group's second concert film. Directed by Vincent Morisset, this mostly black-and-white, moody exercise in making digital footage from 2008 look like long-lost video from around the time when Ian Curtis was still doing gigs is radically different from the first Sigur Rós cinema project, 2007's heima. Although the earlier film showed a band at the height of indie fame serving as ambassadors for Iceland's culture, folklore and colorful, epic landscapes, the sparse Inni (the title translates as "inside") comes in the middle of a long hiatus, with the bandmembers pursuing solo projects. Canadian experimentalist (and Arcade Fire associate) Morisset transferred the digital performance footage to 16mm film and continued filtering, reframing and refocusing it, using color archival material of early TV interviews and backstage outtakes as separators between songs. The result is a hazy, shoegazy visual tone that is both elegiac and eulogistic, at once meditative and funereal. At a time when most U.S. music documentaries have devolved into either artist-endorsed EPKs (see Scorsese's Dylan and George Harrison docs) or predictable Behind the Music-style fables of redemption, it's refreshing to see state-sponsored artists still flying the flag for the rock film as an art film.