It's neither drama nor dramatization. It's not documentary. I think the best word I can come up with is account. It's an account of the extraordinary, shameful and politically pivotal events in Belfast's Maze prison during the spring of 1981 when IRA activist Bobby Sands starved himself to death.
The account is by Steve McQueen, International Turner Prize winner for his video art works. It won the Camera d'Or for first time filmmakers at Cannes, and it's as powerful as its subject. Until a remarkable two-handed sequence between Sands and a priest about an hour into the film there's hardly any dialogue. McQueen, entirely comfortable in a world of evocative images, avoids any anticipated dialectic, relying instead on the contrast between the mundane and the extraordinary to tell a complex tale.
In reducing it to a quintessence he sidesteps sentimentality, though he leaves much room for the passion of belief. And he avoids taking sides, allowing the audience to construct their own tale of consequence from the parade of shots.
In a film called Hunger, within the first ten minutes a prison guard eats two meals. The first is at his breakfast table as he prepares for work. Apart from two details the preparation is unremarkable, but those two exceptions tell us immediately we're not in Kansas anymore. The second meal, a packed lunch, is consumed within the prison guard's room. By then we know all too well the confines of a world which could be anywhere. The important thing is, it's a world from which there's no escape.
Throughout the film, as we're introduced to the physical realities, brutalities and degradations of men doing their jobs against men who have realized their resistence cannot be physical, McQueen's camera settles on the most seemingly innocuous images that become iconic.
He finds strange beauty in a shot of an empty room. Or a crack on the wall. The off-centre framing of a battered face.
There's no ironic backing track. Instead, McQueen uses a succession of relentless rhythms, whether from prison officers banging truncheons against body shields, or the sound of their blows against the naked bodies of men who've refused to wear prison uniforms, claiming they are political prisoners not criminals.
At a few telling times the voice over of Margaret Thatcher expresses the defiant pain of the intransigent English against anything perpetrated by the IRA.
The film covers about a month, the last in Sands' life. After the nearly silent set-up comes the single shot held for about 20 minutes of Sands and the priest as they discuss whether the prisoner's imminent hunger-strike will be undertaken as a suicide attempt or one of compelling principle. McQueen really does leave you to decide. At the crucial moment in the conversation he switches to a more conventional series of close-ups. First on Sands, via the intense face of Michael Fassbinder who delivers not so much a performance as a man's soul, and then on the wonderful Liam Cunningham as Father Moran, down-to-earth and trying to understand Bobby's dedication even as he begins to question his own.
As the two men discuss what is essentially the meaning of life and the meaning of a life, all that moves is the swirling smoke from their cigarettes - separate strands, conjoining, evaporating, drifting away. Doing what smoke will do. And McQueen lets it do its work as image and as metaphor.
The last section of the film tracks Sands' degeneration from vigorous, impassioned protester to a man as helpless as a blade of grass.
I wonder how the chateratti will flutter their fans in anticipation of McQueen's next film - and whether they'll allow the point of this one to pierce their shields.
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Salopian
Posted - 12/06/2008 : 23:33:28 It's beautifully made but like The Baader Meinhof Phenomenon one cannot get away from the fact that being a terrorist is just idiotic. The news during my childhood was full of bombings. I just don't have much sympathy for people in prison having to wear prison uniforms (which after all are not defined as criminal uniforms despite the prisoners' claims). I know though that there were things actually severely wrong with how they were treated in the Maze and I would have rather seen more details of that. Because of the film-maker's background as an artist his choices were overly aesthetic.
