Steve McQueen Part One: Hunger (2008)

Swing down around here for a Steve McQueen encounter, his first entry into the canon of cinematic history and it's a stormer. POWER. Power-FUL. It's so powerful and angsty and raw and photographically gripping. I could describe all the wizard techniques McQueen and his cinematographer Sean Bobbitt get up to, lay-out all their tricks and sneakiness on a plain (or some other flat surface) but that would gravely transcend and remove the essence of Hunger. How they do it is not necessary. All that is necessary is the power and the effect the image-viscerality has on me, or you. They zealously infect every frame with copious dollops of grey sadness. And this is McQueen's debut (for which he received some prize by the jury at Cannes).

McQueen, as writer (alongside Enda Walsh), introduces us to three primary characters whose respective lives revolve around a prison full of 'political terrorists' in Troubled Northern Ireland, 1981. First we meet the morose silence of prison guard Raymond (Stuart Graham). He lives daily under the clouded spectre of imminent death; he's a man coming to the end of his psychological tether, wracked by fear and guilt, unable to connect with his colleagues, torn asunder by the brittle realities that govern his meagre existence: his guilt-flecked knuckles, bloodied by the physical abuse he's obliged to dole out to inmates. In a twist of power structure irony though, the forlorn existentialism - borne out of crippling self-disgust - are not experiences shared by those battered inmates.

They are the metaphorically (and spiritually) liberated few; not economically coerced to perform unhumanly acts by authorities from above, but free and able to chase their own socio-political ideals; safe and sound in the warm bosom of faith, of sincerely believing in their rightness and knowing that in the end they will prevail. And so whilst inhabiting that mental haven, they recklessly abandon their physical bodies to all manner of unspeakable filth. All bodily sacrifices are made. The second character is a new inductee into the prison and another who engages in the deprecating non-prison uniform protest (the uniform being a visual submission to an authority they consider evil and alien). He (Brian Milligan) and his cell-mate (Liam McMahon) perform every protest imaginable.

Figs of humour do spring eternal though, however fleeting: during the family meet times there are subtle parlances aplenty, conducted all clandestine-like with trinkets and radios stuffed up vaginas, messages relayed via the warm garment folds of babies etc. Here in the background we are introduced to Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands, the republican willing to travel any lengths to see the personal freedoms of his people realised. Despite the emasculation symbology infused with the cutting of his hair and a violently uncomfortable rectal inspection, he ploughs on his impossible furrow nonetheless. Disregarding all who attempt to sway him otherwise. Even his ally/friend Father Dominic (played by the ebullient Liam Cunningham, better known as Davos Seaworth) cannot deter or redirect his self-destructive energies away from a planned hunger strike. 

Their interview is the centrepiece to Hunger. It's 16 and a half minutes of solid, quick-fire, impassioned dialogue from one singular dispassionate Kubrickian angle, adjacent from Sands and the Father, placed equally between each. Tip the hat, bend the knee nothing but praise can be directed towards Fassbender and Cunningham for the multitudes of their talent: they managed to sustain the requisite level of intensity for a remarkably long period of pure acting time (not to mention being able to remember the lines and pauses [okay so I guess it could have been a bit improvised but if that was the case it makes it all the more impressive]). Hereon in we're left to feast on the sumptuous photographic delights of Sands' protracted hunger strike. And it's gruesome. Hideous closeups are alternated with woozy trauma-inducing camera work as he gradually loses his grip on contemporary time and space; his mind devolves back to a day that he perceived to be his golden period, an afternoon he once spent as a boy in rural Ireland running cross-countryside.

Hunger is so powerful, so formidable a viewing it's impossible for any viewer to remain aloof from any of the themes that run prevalent through its hour-and-a-half runtime - and I haven't even touched on the religious aspects (a pretty fundamental feature of The Troubles admittedly but not, I don't think, a central part of this film). McQueen pushed many intangible filmmaking boundaries here, breaking moulds and conventions then inventing new ones. He plays with traditional chronologies of plotlines and arbitrary factors that transcend cinema ('time') then dismisses them all in favour of something more elusive: visual style, with raw human substance.