Striking Hunger

The screening of Steve McQueen's Hunger brought a full house to Wexner Wednesday night. I knew Steve McQueen was a big deal, but I didn't know he was such a big deal. Admission was special priced; Sherri, Wexner's Director, was there for the introduction; and everybody was there, film studies people, college of arts people, all those artsy and filmsy faces.


When you see this poster, what do you think this beautiful pattern is? Would you have a better clue if you were told first that the film is about a famous hunter strike in the prison of Northern Ireland? It is shit, poop, human discharge...however you name it. It's the trace of shit on the wall after a prison guard cleaned it, or tried to, with high-pressure water. There is no toilet in the prison cells, so prisoners pour their urine out through the gap between the cell door and floor, and they paint their poop on the wall, with their bare hands.

Steve McQueen is an extremely normal looking African-British. If you don't know who he is, you probably would assume he is one of those cleaners with a broom, paper towels and detergent waiting outside a lady's bathroom. No racial profiling here I swear to god, but the way he dresses and his look are just not artsy or schorlarly or nerdy or weird in any way.

The movie will definitely make one of the top 10 movies I see in 2009. It is filled with control, power, and defiance. The tension never stops. I could barely remember to blink my eyes or to breath. I could feel vividly how my body was being electrified again and again and again. It's different from the kind of shock created by fast editing or huge explosion. The tension of the movie runs under the skin, constantly. I would want to watch the movie for a second time or even more, not to appreciate the art of it, but just to experience the movie.

The tension of the movie is created by extremities. The violent and appalling imagery counters the rigorous image composition and patient construction of pace and rhythm. Good movies are not the perfect ones. Good movies teach you how to watch them. Like Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Hunger trains you to be observative. Hunger leads you through a maze of daily rituals of prisoners and prison guards with great patience. Movie starts with a man soaking his hands in the water. The knuckles are seriously wounded, red. Why? The way he puts on his rings and his clothes are neatly folded and placed, you know it must have been like this for however many years in his adult life. Before he leaves his house, he looks around and checks if anyone has placed any bomb under his car. Again, you know he does it everyday. But why? Only after a quarter of the movie has gone by, the movie reveals that he is a prison guard whose job is to beat up prisoners, which explains his wound and precaution.

Another instance is the shit on the wall. With the prisoner who first appears in the movie entering his cell, he sees the inside of the space, unevenly browned walls. He looks around, probably trying to figure out what it is as all the audience are. His curiosity and ours, his fear and ours, encounter and merge at this moment through a point-of-view shot. You're so taken over by a desire of wanting to know that you almost forget you're watching a movie. You are no longer watching a movie. You are watching the walls. First I thought it was blood. Then I knew it is not blood from the texture of it, but I still didn't know what it was. As a matter of fact, it was still hard for me to believe what it is when I saw the scene of a prisoner sticking his hands in his pants and his ass. It is just beyond my imagination that any human would want to live in the middle of our own shit, but obviously it was not a matter of choice, and that's probably the best way to dispose it according to prisoner's experience after years.

McQueen comes from a fine art background. When an audience asked him about his poetic imgery, he said it was easy. Compared to the history of painting, that of film is nothing. He gains his inspiration from painting. McQueen speaks through image, so do the characters in his movie. A character who only appears twice, in the form of voice, in the movie is Margaret Thatcher. However, her voice is such an important vehicle in contextualizing the political environment of the hunger strike, virtually the only vehicle. Thatcher's voice is always accompanied with images. The second time, it is the image of the inside of prison. With her voice filling the hallway, her politics takes an invisible existence that haunts every prisoners and prison guards.

The core scene is a 17-minute long negotiation between Sands and a priest. It is seemingly the most laid-back scene of the whole movie: people are communicating, occasionally with a joke, with each other in a non-violence way. Both parties elaborate on their stance, but neither surrender. The encounter of verbalized opinions is violence in another form, and it takes you further in their mind and identity. The moment the priest is convinced, or let's say he gives up, you know it's the end of violence in the movie, but the start of Sands struggling in hunger.

With all the stories told and all the details depicted through a relatively slow pace, it is almost hard to believe that the movie is only 96 minute long. Again it is the extremities. There's no grey area, no neutral zone, no time for a nerve rest. There is very little dialogue in the movie. When prisoners and prison guards are separately portrayed, all of them are leading a life filled with oppressed silence; when they meet, it's explicit violence in the sound of beating and screaming.

It is not a story that many people can associate themselves with. McQueen spent 5 years working on this movie. He interviewed hunger strike survivors and then prison guards. As for history and history-telling, this movie can be only one version of it, but McQueen sure has delivered his vision clearly and beautifully.