The first reports of Steve McQueen’s Hunger called it ‘controversial’. What they really meant was that the hunger strike in Belfast’s Maze prison that led to the deaths of ten IRA prisoners in 1981 is still a somewhat controversial event. The film has in fact been met with wide acclaim all over the world and even went on to win the Cannes Film Festival’s Camera d’Or for best feature film and the inaugural Sydney Film Festival Prize. Arts Hub’s own Boris Kelly described the film as “a visual and philosophical meditation on the psycho-physical extremes of prison life and the politics of sacrifice”.
There was, however, one review by Dave Cox of the Guardian’s Comment is Free which said the film was far too sympathetic to the ‘fenians’ and called for more extreme torture of the political prisoners: “Far from being shocked at seeing the inmates roughed up a bit, I found myself wishing they’d been properly tortured, preferably savagely, imaginatively and continuously.” While Cox claims he was getting carried away and that his response was “immoderate”, his review received more than 700 comments in response and 21 formal complaints.
Making art out of a political event or character can be a minefield. Historical films about politics are often lauded for being inaccurate, too subjective, or for adding romantic love interests for a bit of drama. The recent Baader Meinhof Complex, for example, has been criticised for not giving enough context or explanation of Meinhof’s motives. Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima and Flags of our Fathers were an attempt to sidestep complaints of bias by showing the same event twice but from the perspective of the other side.
When I first heard that a Turner Prize-winning artist from London was making a film about Bobby Sands, funded by FilmFour and the UK Arts Council, my expectations were not high. Although Bobby Sands died just before I was born, his legacy continued throughout my childhood in Belfast and the subsequent Northern Ireland political situation. One hundred metres from my dad’s house, a picture of Bobby’s face was painted and still stands on the side of the building, greeting traffic into the west of the city. But how could someone from London tell his story?
Laurence McKeown is an ex-political prisoner and was on the hunger strike started by Sands when the strike was finally called off. “That’s the very same question I asked him myself,” said McKeown. “He was given the funding and could have made a film about anything and he chose to write about this. But Steve said that as a Black teenager in London, Bobby was a major influence and did have a significant impact on his life.”
McQueen has since discussed his motivation for making the film and undergoing an extensive period of research talking to many of the prisoners and prison guards involved. “[Bobby’s] image appeared on the TV screen virtually every night with a number underneath it and it stayed with me,” he said. “That passion and that level of confrontation to die on hunger strike. This memory and this opportunity drew me to find out more about him and I thought it could be a powerful film.”
The film’s premiere was in Belfast and many of the IRA ex-prisoners were invited to the screening. “I was involved with setting up the Belfast Film Festival and to have Hunger premiering there was a very significant moment,” said Laurence. “He handled the subject in a very sympathetic way and in his own artistic way. The people who knew Bobby Sands and the situation saw it as an authentic portrayal.”
It is testimony to McQueen and others involved with the writing and production that Hunger was received so well by the ex-prisoner community and by critics alike. “The proof of a successful film that deals with this kind of subject, is if people get into it,” said Laurence, “and it isn’t as important politically what the whole situation is – they’re able to identify with the characters and the situation.”
There is a lot of weight behind the film due to respect for McQueen as an award-winning artist and as someone who can look at the situation objectively. His experience of working on a commission about the Iraq war for the Imperial War Museum in 2003 has no doubt developed his capacity to deal with such sensitive issues. If Hunger had been made badly – either through a clumsy handling of the subject, or by portraying Sands as a kind of martyr – it would likely have come in for criticism of the subject matter as well.
But Hunger is of an entirely different ilk from mainstream political films that have gone before. There is little attempt to put the experience inside the prison into the context of the wider political situation in Northern Ireland. The closing credits tell us that over 100,000 people attended Bobby Sands’ funeral and that he was elected to Westminster as an MP, but there is no indication of this beforehand. In fact, we are led to believe during Bobby’s conversation with the priest that he is acting somewhat independently of the IRA political leadership.
McQueen has said of Hunger, “I want to show what it was like to see, hear, smell and touch in the H-Block in 1981. What I want to convey is something you cannot find in books or archives: the ordinary and extraordinary, of life in this prison. Yet the film is also an abstraction of what it is to die for a cause.”
Hunger is so effective precisely because it focuses on the personal. Towards the end the audience eventually sees the world through Sands’ eyes in his final days. This is not to say that it isn’t political, because it overwhelmingly conveys the political through the sense of injustice – for prisoners and the experience of the prison-guards as well. But this is shown through sounds – the sparse dialogue, Bobby Sand’s physical human deterioration – not by making an attempt to record a particular period in history. This more surreal approach to telling stories about individuals in conflict situations is growing more prevalent, with films like Waltz With Bashir and last year’s Persepolis, both of which use more experimental animation to convey the protagonist’s experience of conflict and war.
In a 24-hour media world where audiences are vividly shown real-life conflict and suffering and are bombarded with news, there is a demand for cinema to explore more innovative story-telling techniques and to emphasise aspects of conflict of which we are not immediately aware. Hunger doesn’t attempt to paint an all-round picture of a political situation. It tells the story of a much more personal war – one in which the battle ground is the body and the day-to-day decisions about food and clothing become the actions of an army. And hopefully, it marks the beginning of a trend allowing films to move away from journalistic perspectives and revel in the more evocative possibilities available.