Hunger is the first feature film by Turner Prize winning British Video artist Steve McQueen. It took the Caméra d’Or prize at Cannes, honoring outstanding work by a first time director. The film is gut-wrenching, but not without tact. Political themes are deeply explored, but Hunger avoids being overly preachy. The film follows the true story of the last six weeks in the life of inmate Bobby Sands, a hunger striker and member of the IRA. Because it’s based on actual historical events, it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that the film does not have a happy ending.
The structure is somewhat atypical. The film opens by following a prison guard through his daily routine, which includes powerful, slow shots of him dipping his bloody knuckles in water after beating inmates. Pensive, nearly silent scenes gradually add together to give the viewer a chilling picture of the facility and the abuses occurring there.
The camera then begins to watch the travails of a new inmate upon his arrival. He is stripped naked, refusing to don a prison uniform as part of a protest to be recognized as a political prisoner. The film continues with wordless long takes. Two prisoners in a tiny cell, walls smeared with human waste. Cleverly discreet exchanges of contraband during family visits. Body cavity searches. Brutal beatings.
More after the jump.
McQueen’s video art roots are very apparent in this first half of the film. The camera wanders from one image to another. Each speaking volumes about the absurd brutality of the situation, with little or no dialog. The focus eventually shifts to Bobby Sands, and the narrative begins to take shape: Sands is preparing to initiate a hunger strike, to the death if need be, so that he and his comrades are recognized as political prisoners by the British government.
I asked Steve McQueen about the difference between working in video art and narrative film, he said, “With this film everyone can come and everyone can follow it. It is very simple.” Opposed to an elitist notion of art that “[tries] to reduce language or refine language to a state where one can communicate in an artistic way.”
A little over halfway through the film there is a pivotal scene, a dialog between Bobby Sands and his priest. The conversation is a least ten straight minutes, most of it captured in a single take. Just when McQueen seemed to have settled in to making a film out of silent, contemplative images, he cuts to this crucial dialog. Bobby informs the priest of his plans to begin the hunger strike, while the priest encourages compromise.
About the scene, McQueen said, “What I’m interested in is how two people have a conversation.” He explained his choice to shoot the incredibly long take from the side of the table, rather than cutting back and forth between shots of the actors “because what you’re doing is the actor is talking to the audience. I didn’t want the actor to talk to the audience I wanted the actor to talk to the person that is in front of him. So you build up a sort of intimacy within the shot but also a distance from the audience. … The seed of that idea was, I wanted … two guys on the same side of the tracks but different, wanting the same thing but wanting it differently.” The great thing about the dialog is that the length allows the priest to make a very convincing argument against the hunger strike, only to be rebutted by Bobby whose determination and conviction are incredibly admirable. When the conversation ends, it’s not entirely clear if the hunger strike is a good idea, but what is clear is that Bobby is a force of nature, his every action a seeming inevitability.
In the last third of the film we watch as Bobby slowly starves to death, inter-cut with flashbacks from his childhood. When I brought up the idea that the film will be compared to recent events at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, McQueen flatly said, “It’s not an eureka moment, it’s obvious.” What is unique about the stories of prisoner abuse in Northern Ireland is that the conflict is contained within the white, Western world. “What I think is great in thinking about this film is that it’s not a far off exotic distant place in the world. It’s in the realms of Britain. So therefore it’s not a distant exotic place, it’s actually in one’s own backyard. And the guys are not called Ali or whatever name, they are Sean and John. The majority of people [who see the film] … will look like them on screen and will have that relationship which is much closer.”
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