Bath Film Festival 2008

Hunger

Hunger

Download film note by Joelle Adams

An uncompromising feature film debut by British artist Steve McQueen, Hunger is an account of the 1981 hunger strike in Northern Ireland’s Maze prison. The film follows the last six weeks in the life of Republican Bobby Sands (played with unflinching passion by Michael Fassbender) who died 66 days into the strike, and thrusts viewers into the dark depths of the Maze’s notorious 1980s H-Block. As well as winning the Camera d’Or at this year’s Cannes festival, Hunger won the 2008 Gucci Group Award at Venice which honours filmmakers from other disciplines. McQueen, who won the 1999 Turner Prize, featured heavily in the press for his work For Queen and Country, commissioned whilst he was the UK’s official war artist. For Queen and Country McQueen designed postage stamps that replaced the Queen’s head with the faces of soldiers killed in Iraq and was McQueen’s tribute to Britain’s war dead. EH

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Hunger
Reply #1 on : Wed November 05, 2008, 03:35:26
Thanks Film Fest/AMIE for screening Hunger, the directoral debut by visual artist Steve McQueen.

I note Mr Raby's comments elsewhere on this blog regarding the over-reliance upon whiz-bang special effects in so much cinematic output these days. None of that here. McQueen's willingness to let the camera linger and the pared-down approach he takes to cutting between shots pays huge dividends.

It's a film whose power lies in offsetting the emormity and complexity of the ethical issues it seeks to address against the attention it affords to the most intimate and telling details. The pivotal scene - a dialogue between Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a priest (Liam Cunningham) about the religious, ethical and moral dimensions of the hunger strike - is played to an entirely static camera. It's a bravura piece of acting in which every nuance of gesture, voice and phrasing is starkly relevant.

Some critics have said that McQueen's depiction of events is too strongly biased to the republican point of view. I think this film graphically illustrates how dangerous and destructive the entrenched ideological positions of both sides were. I feel it gives equal weight to the extremes of inhumanity and tenderness that the situation gave rise to in both captor and captive.

Much of the impact of the slippery, ethical wrangling that takes place between Sands and the priest in the film's crucial scene is derived from the fact that a crucial facet of the debate - the morality of killing innocent people in pursuit of a political cause - is left to us to insert. Consequently, while that debate is largely absent from the dialogue of the characters on screen it is none-the-less a powerfully omnipresent factor in the mind of the viewer throughout the film.

Go see.

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