Hunger (2008)

12 Years a Slave turned out not to be as convincing as the celebratory reviews made it seem. I reacted rather strongly against Steve McQueen's handling of the material and his strange preoccupation with bodily suffering. In that respect, Hunger is more of the same - more of the same problems, that is. Also here, I found what I would call an almost sadistic fascination with gore and suffering. I could understand such a preoccupation if I would get an impression of a real concern, a desire to reveal a specific side of suffering (like in Dreyer's Jeanne D'arc, to take an obvious example). The setting of Hunger is 1982 North Ireland, a prison and a hunger strike started by IRA men. In itself, this is a promising start. It's just that I feel that McQueen, despite a lengthy conversational scene in which a prisoner and a priest talk to each other about the utility of hunger strikes, does not succeed in bringing out the political context. Or: the political context does not seem to be the main preoccupation here. Perhaps my own lack of background knowledge inhibits my understanding of the film, but I think there's more to it. It's more that I really for my life do not see what kind of pespective on the prisoner's physical torment the film offers. We see the gruesome details of it, but the film keeps an icy distance: it lets us see, but I am not at all sure how I should look. The camera follows Bobby Sands' ordeals, and ultimately, his death, and it is a relentless trail - it is almost as if the hard determination of the prisoner and the guards is mirrored by the camera: it looks and looks. But determination for what? The prisoners' protest, they act, they are represented as disgruntled and resentful. There are merits of the film and those mainly have to do with the form. McQueen pares down the medium of film into a very economic language of images, sounds and very sparse dialogue. The question is, again, to what use McQueen's artistic skills are put. One reviewer writes: "Personally, I was even more impressed with McQueen's ability to wield silence like a painter instinctively aware of which portions of the canvas to leave blank." What worries me is whether Hunger in the end lands in a form of aesthetization where the violence is stylized so much that the only thing left is an isolated reaction in the viewer. In one long scene, as economical as anything else in the film, we see a guard swooping urine down a hallway. The only sound we here is the swooshing and scraping and the only thing we see is the guard approaching us from down the hallway. The scene is painterly, austere almost, but what does it tell us? In what position does it place us?