“The Brixton Riots, Tottenham winning the FA cup - which was fantastic - and Bobby Sands. “Aged 11 or 12, there were three things that influenced me,” he explained. Sixty-six days after he started, Sands died, only to be followed by nine other prisoners who subsequently also died before the movement came to an end.įor McQueen, who grew up in England, Sands was an enigma. His gaunt face appeared regularly on the nightly news, and his physical decline made front-page headlines. A month into his hunger strike, he was elected as a Member of Parliament. As Sands turned weaker and more emaciated, he grew in the public imagination. But unlike an earlier attempt, rather than the prisoners starving en masse, each prisoner would do it individually, and when he died, a new prisoner would start up. In 1981, Bobby Sands began a second hunger strike. Campaign after campaign seemed to have little or no effect on the British government. They followed this with the “dirty protest,” during which prisoners refused to wash or clean their cells, urinated into the hallways and smeared their shit on their cell walls. In the first campaign, the “blanket protests,” prisoners refused to wear anything but blankets until their special category status was reinstated. For the next six years, prisoners engaged in a series of calculated acts of resistance. For IRA members, removing their military identity was itself an act of war, and it was greeted with their full opposition. But after March 1976, this status was phased out and all such prisoners were classified as common criminals and housed in the “H-Blocks” section of the Maze prison. Beginning in July 1972, Irish Republican inmates were recognized as prisoners of war. In 1976, at the height of “The Troubles” (as the English were fond of calling the conflict in Northern Ireland), the British government stripped away Special Category Status from IRA prisoners. In Hunger, McQueen captures in painstaking detail the physicality of life within the prison walls (the stench, the maggots, the numbing cold), but the larger emotional hunger that fuels this tragedy remains purposefully enigmatic. His 1993 nine-minute video Bear, for example, stages a powerful, physical encounter between two large, naked men (one of whom is McQueen), and while the film‘s smackdown reality is obvious, its final meaning is not. Previously, when asked to describe his short documentary-like piece Carib‘s Leap, McQueen explained, “I want this movie to be like a smell.” In so much of the artist‘s work the sheer physicality of the body is represented in both stark and ambiguous ways. ![]() The director, who made his reputation as a visual artist working in the medium of film, attempts to create a cinematic experience that reaches far beyond the historic memory of that word “hunger” in order to express its brute reality. But McQueen‘s film, soon to be released by IFC, is far from a simple period drama. McQueen‘s film, which won the Camera d‘Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, takes you deep inside the Maze prison outside of Belfast from the mid-‘70s to 1981 to dramatize the complex political maneuvering that drove Sands to starve himself to death in his fight against British domination. The hunger in the title of Steve McQueen‘s debut feature alludes to the 1981 hunger strike by Irish Republican Army prisoner Bobby Sands.
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