Hunger

Just sat down on the train back home, accompanied by my freshly bought sandwich and juice which feel somewhat inappropriate, having just left a belated screening of ‘Hunger’.

It feels strange having seen this so long after the hype has died down. But nice. Unobstructed by any critics’ viewpoints at the front of my mind, or the need to come out and articulate an opinion for discussion with friends.

Whilst I’m little familiar with Steve McQueen’s art (will look into ASAP), I was surprised that this didn’t feel like an ‘artist’s’ film (or at least a Young British Artist’s film), by which I mean that there was very little concept or abstraction as we’ve become used to seeing in the art of the YBAs. It’s actually an incredibly tidy film. Neat and logical. I found many of the shots comfortingly predictable, even if the recurrent close-ups might be considered unorthodox for some. In some ways, it had all the meticulousness of a showcase short film, which is perhaps why it felt so familiar to me. I actually felt like with its symmetry, measured framing and careful tracking shots, among other things, I was watching the film of someone with OCD. The meticulousness does work nicely as a visual mirror for the routine and supposed order of the prison.

The only shot where I felt a flutter of excitement was in the layering of a shot of a weakening, delusional Bobby in bed crossed with a shot of a flock of dispersing birds in the sky. The birds then become a recurrent conceit as his body weakens.

I’ve always been ashamed at my lack of understanding of the Irish question (although I was reassured when I probed my parents about it, who lived through it and even remembered the hunger strike, but who also said they didn’t fully comprehend it). We were not taught it at school, which in retrospect I think is really poor (I lost count of how many times we did Nazi Germany). I think that a mix of authoritative and personal arrogance (it’s an Irish problem, not English) has stopped me researching it independently since. It’s awful that I couldn’t tell you why right now we are not fearing an IRA attack, yet I remember a few years ago the Arndale Bombing in Manchester.

The film’s story is based around the Irish prisoners who had been jailed for involvement in the ‘Troubles’ (which had so far claimed over 2000 lives). The prisoners are aggressively pursuing the status of political prisoners and the associated rights that this status brings (namely, better treatment than other convicted criminals). At the beginning of the film they are on the ‘no wash’ and ‘blanket’ (going naked rather than wear prisoner clothes) protests. Bobby Gillan (who initially seems like our main protagonist) enters a cell where his cellmate has smeared his faeces all over the walls.

Some of the most shocking scenes occur when the guards attempt to wash or cut the hair of the prisoners. The brutality is frightening. The prisoners scrabble and fight like animals. This debasement of man seems to be coming at me from all angles right now. Before my recent trip to Berlin, I started reading ‘Papillon’, Henri-Georges Charriere’s narrative of his escape from the notorious prison in French Guiana with an 80% mortality rate (this book came recommended to me some time ago by a taxi driver). Berlin also saw me take a trip to Sachsenhausen – Germany’s first, and supposed ‘model’ concentration camp. Meanwhile, just 2 days ago on Friday I read a Guardian feature on the new Charles Bronson film, written (the article, not the film) by an ex-lifer with plenty of anecdotes. I’m certainly not drawn to reading these stories, in fact I generally try to shirk them (despite the evidence, although I’ve since put Papillon down). However what I am drawn to is the question of what exactly brings about this barbarity between men? If you give any man the power to do as he wishes with another, and a certain set of conditions, does every man have it within him to debase his subordinate to the extreme? One of Hunger’s most touching scenes sees a riot policeman shirking his duty of beating the prisoners – while seeing him cry of the right of the shot, behind a wall, the beatings from his colleagues are still visible on the right.

The film is largely quite a mute one, tracking movements, actions and expressions much more than dialogue. This makes a long dialogue scene between Bobby Sands and the prison priest at around the halfway point very intense. In a remarkably long dialogue-heavy take, Sands explains his plans to launch a new hunger strike where man will begin at 2 weeks intervals, with new men replacing the dead. While the father supports the cause, he cannot condone the suicide mission. In another neat symmetry, we return to the cold, harsh quietness of the film’s first half as we watch Sands slip towards death. Fassbender’s commitment to his emaciation must be commended since there is little room to question the authenticity of any of his degeneration. Even the sores on his body look real.

By the time of his death I was emotionally ambivalent, It didn’t raise any tears, but I’m glad that it didn’t feel as if it has been contrived to.

Some parts of the film raised interest but then seemed to hit a dead end. The prison guard whose minutiae is followed for the first 15 or so minutes only appears sporadically after, before getting shot in the back of the head at a nursing home where he is visiting his entirely uncommunicative mother. The shot of her blood spattered face with his head in her lap – like many of the film’s frames – would stand alone as a beautifully crafted photograph. But we’re not given any clues about how the incident comes about or who exactly the assassin is.

We don’t actually begin to focus on Sands until some way in. Rather, two other prisoners are our initial focus. But we never learn their fate or see their reactions to Sands’ plan. We never see any of the other prisoners at all after Sands tells the Father that he will start the hunger strike. Elsewhere, the trio are regularly seen exchanging items with their visitors (drugs, a radio etc) but the consequences are never developed – one guy listens to his radio briefly, and the drug-taking is brief and non-descript.

Perhaps I am too harsh since such developments are what I should expect of a conventional fictional narrative, while McQueen’s is not that, and has a convincing fiction-documentary hybrid feel. The stunted developments could just as well be seen as delivering a more truthful view of the routine of their daily life.

But there is also the sense that McQueen enjoys challenging his viewer. In one scene where the prisoners have once again poured their urine into the corridors from under the doors, a cleaner starts to mop it up. We watch him approach us form a fixed viewpoint at the exact opposite end of the corridor. My exact thought after about 20 seconds was ‘please don’t make us watch him mop the whole corridor’ – and that’s exactly what he did for the next few minutes. But this mild frustration and sense of imprisonment in someone else’s gaze does really mirror the content and I think its bravery should be applauded.

Overall, that is exactly the right word to describe this debut feature from Steve McQueen – brave – both in content and form. I would have been keen to see what subject next caught his attention but I did read that he thinks this may be his only feature – much related to the huge time investment it demanded.

Will be looking at another YBA’s take on cinema in Sam Taylor-Wood’s ‘Love You More’ which should arrive this week…

Addendum:
Really interesting interview with Fassbender and Cunningham about the long dialogue scene here