Steve McQueen's debut film, concerning the 1981 hunger strike by IRA inmates at the Maze prison, is both a cinematic triumph and an aesthetic mess. The film offers the viewer some of the most extraordinary images in modern film-making, some incredibly intense scenes, startling and entirely committed performances and daring shots to die for; on the other hand, the narrative is a complete mess, without proper focus and therefore devoid of meaning, and style of the film is a mish-mash of techniques none of which are consistently used, again this mitigates against meaning.
Take the narrative: we begin with a prison guard, and follow a sequence beginning with him soaking his blooded fist and ending with an explanation (which we guessed anyway) of how he got his fist in that state; then we follow a new prisoner as he is inducted into the cell and at the same time the ongoing dirty protest. We get an impressionistic portrait of life in the prison, with concentration flitting between the prisoners (their daily routine, their methods of communicating with the outside world) and the guards (our original protagonist ends up being murdered whilst visiting his mother in an old people's home). Only about a third of the way in does Bobby Sands become our focusing figure, with concentration settling on him once he has decided to begin the hunger strike, this time determined to take it all the way to death. There's a long, static conversation between him and the priest, beginning with an unbroken 10 minute medium shot of the two talking (neither moves from his position, physically nor dramatically) which then slides into a close-up of Sands giving an extremely articulate reminiscing speech about the time he put a foal out of its misery on a cross country run, a metaphor for his current decision. This archly theatrical sequence stands out like a sore thumb in the film, justifying itself by its daring and concentration yet having little aesthetically to do with the rest of the film's style. After this, the film concentrates entirely on Sands' self-imposed martyrdom, relentlessly following his gradual wasting unto death. In this final section, we get impressionistic point of view shots from inside the mind of the dying man as well as romanticised flashback memories of his youth. Whilst none of this adds up to anything like a coherent experience, it does have considerable impact on the viewer - you feel at the end as if you've been through something, even though I would defy anyone to know what it all adds up to.
Many of the images (immaculately shot in scope) are indelible: the sh*t-smeared walls, with the camera spiralling in as on a mandala; the urine slowly leaking from the cells at slop-out into an empty prison corridor; a prisoner putting his fist through a break in his window bars (shades here of Genet's Un Chant D'Amour), the blanket swathed bodies of the otherwise naked men congregating around an altar where a priest drones on unheeded as they gossip; the senile mother of the guard drenched in her son's blood. Most memorable of all is the sore-covered and emaciated body of Sands in his wasting period - Hunger follows Richard Hamilton's painting The Citizen and Terry George's film Some Mother's Son in bringing out the Christ-like aspects of the prisoner's look (and sacrifice), but takes the imagery to new levels of intensity referencing Matthias Grünewald's shocking portrait of the Crucified Christ in the Isenheim Altarpiece.
Sands consciously compares himself to Christ in his conversation with the priest, and the film's structure does something to agree with him. Where one pierces the skin of a story is always a telling decision, and the fact that McQueen and his co-writer begin with the dirty protest rather than the crimes which put these men in prison in the first place is revealing of their commitments - although why begin with their crimes and not the crimes of house burning and civilian massacre which inspired the IRA campaign in the first place? There is always going to be contention in a story like this, and the filmmakers are perhaps to be applauded for making a decision to concentrate on the H-block experience and stay there (although the Sands flashbacks are artistically dubious).
Hunger, then, is an extremely mixed bag - not entirely one feels the work of a filmmaker in complete control of his material (although his camera always does what he wishes it to do). One is left, though, with a pretty extraordinary contribution to British cinema (usually so safe and bland and unnecessary) and a vision of what is a pretty squalid episode in British history, in which there was a stinking corner of the land governed by Queen and Westminster parliament in which men pushed their bodies to the extremes of human suffering through their criminal reaction to the crimes which had been perpetrated by the establishment on their people.
Take the narrative: we begin with a prison guard, and follow a sequence beginning with him soaking his blooded fist and ending with an explanation (which we guessed anyway) of how he got his fist in that state; then we follow a new prisoner as he is inducted into the cell and at the same time the ongoing dirty protest. We get an impressionistic portrait of life in the prison, with concentration flitting between the prisoners (their daily routine, their methods of communicating with the outside world) and the guards (our original protagonist ends up being murdered whilst visiting his mother in an old people's home). Only about a third of the way in does Bobby Sands become our focusing figure, with concentration settling on him once he has decided to begin the hunger strike, this time determined to take it all the way to death. There's a long, static conversation between him and the priest, beginning with an unbroken 10 minute medium shot of the two talking (neither moves from his position, physically nor dramatically) which then slides into a close-up of Sands giving an extremely articulate reminiscing speech about the time he put a foal out of its misery on a cross country run, a metaphor for his current decision. This archly theatrical sequence stands out like a sore thumb in the film, justifying itself by its daring and concentration yet having little aesthetically to do with the rest of the film's style. After this, the film concentrates entirely on Sands' self-imposed martyrdom, relentlessly following his gradual wasting unto death. In this final section, we get impressionistic point of view shots from inside the mind of the dying man as well as romanticised flashback memories of his youth. Whilst none of this adds up to anything like a coherent experience, it does have considerable impact on the viewer - you feel at the end as if you've been through something, even though I would defy anyone to know what it all adds up to.
Many of the images (immaculately shot in scope) are indelible: the sh*t-smeared walls, with the camera spiralling in as on a mandala; the urine slowly leaking from the cells at slop-out into an empty prison corridor; a prisoner putting his fist through a break in his window bars (shades here of Genet's Un Chant D'Amour), the blanket swathed bodies of the otherwise naked men congregating around an altar where a priest drones on unheeded as they gossip; the senile mother of the guard drenched in her son's blood. Most memorable of all is the sore-covered and emaciated body of Sands in his wasting period - Hunger follows Richard Hamilton's painting The Citizen and Terry George's film Some Mother's Son in bringing out the Christ-like aspects of the prisoner's look (and sacrifice), but takes the imagery to new levels of intensity referencing Matthias Grünewald's shocking portrait of the Crucified Christ in the Isenheim Altarpiece.
Sands consciously compares himself to Christ in his conversation with the priest, and the film's structure does something to agree with him. Where one pierces the skin of a story is always a telling decision, and the fact that McQueen and his co-writer begin with the dirty protest rather than the crimes which put these men in prison in the first place is revealing of their commitments - although why begin with their crimes and not the crimes of house burning and civilian massacre which inspired the IRA campaign in the first place? There is always going to be contention in a story like this, and the filmmakers are perhaps to be applauded for making a decision to concentrate on the H-block experience and stay there (although the Sands flashbacks are artistically dubious).
Hunger, then, is an extremely mixed bag - not entirely one feels the work of a filmmaker in complete control of his material (although his camera always does what he wishes it to do). One is left, though, with a pretty extraordinary contribution to British cinema (usually so safe and bland and unnecessary) and a vision of what is a pretty squalid episode in British history, in which there was a stinking corner of the land governed by Queen and Westminster parliament in which men pushed their bodies to the extremes of human suffering through their criminal reaction to the crimes which had been perpetrated by the establishment on their people.