Hunger - A portrait of Bobby Sands
By Joyce Glasser - 31/10/2008
With Hunger, Turner Prize winning artist Steve McQueen has gone from film installation art in galleries to feature film directing and writing for cinema. Hunger is a graphic examination of the human body, both as the target for oppressors – in this case brutality and torture -- and as political instrument used to defeat the oppressor -- here through self-neglect, bodily functions and then starvation.
McQueen’s portrait is that of Bobby Sands in the last year of his life, 1981, although the first scenes in the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland do not include Sands at all. They document the arrival of republication prisoner Davey Gilley (Brian Milligan) who strips in front of prison officers and goes to his cold cell naked rather than accept the uniform of non-political prisoners. He shares the cell with another naked and blanketed innate, Gerry Campbell (Liam McMahon), busy decorating the walls with ghastly, fetid compost.
In this respect, the filmmaker has not abandoned his background. McQueen’s first project was entitled BEAR, a portrait of two anonymous naked men. This time, the bodies he shows us are of fit, lean, handsome, mostly bearded young men: Christs on the Stations of the Cross. In one scene, these thin, pale bodies are forced to crawl through a line of sadistic paramilitary police who beat them with clubs every inch of the way. The only thing we know about these prisoners is that they are republicans, hence, Catholics. We know more about Raymond Lohan (brilliantly played by Stuart Graham), a prison officer at the Maze’s infamous H-blocks. Part of Lohan’s rigid morning routine checking for explosive devices under his car and soaking his bloody knuckles in warm water after beating up prisoners taking part in the prison wide no-wash-and-blanket campaign.
The film is divided into three sections of almost equal length, a kind of visual triptych. The first third shows the persecution and degradation in H-block focusing on the brutal protestant prison officer Lohan and the miserable daily routine of Campbell and Gilley. We first see Bobby Sands from a distance during visiting hour, an opportunity to smuggle in a letter hidden in his baby son’s blanket.
The second third consists of a conversation between Sands, and his priest (Liam Cunningham) both men shot in profile separated from the other by a small table and chain smoking, a tableau like Cezanne’s The Card Players. In a mix of natural banter and expository dialogue, we learn a little about Sands’s childhood (although nothing of his IRA activities) and the principles that are driving him to lead the second prison hunger strike. When Cunningham refuses him absolution for the proposed suicide, Sands takes it stoically, but we can almost hear him thinking, ‘Father why hast thou forsaken me?’
The final third is set in the prison hospital, where the filth and noise of H-block is transformed into a clean, comfortable and dreamlike atmosphere. There is almost no dialogue and only muted sound as Sands can neither hear nor talk. In contrast to the battering of bodies in part one, here we witness a detailed, chronological anatomy of self-mutilation through starvation as Sands wastes away. The final minutes are shot through Sands’s eyes with imaginative lens and sound design work from McQueen, Sean Bobbitt and Paul Davies. When Sands finally expires, his noble, non-judgmental mother is there, reminding us of another famous mother and son.
Almost all good art operates on more than one level; Robert Frost going as far as to define poetry as metaphor. Despite the almost documentary realism in the Maze prison scenes and Bobby Sands’s reputation as a political leader, McQueen has chosen to present the story with almost no historical, political or biographical context. The only facts we are given are in the form of sub-titles at the beginning and end of the film as if McQueen did not want to tarnish his visceral images. This isn’t Bobby the Sein Fein freedom fighter; this is the Passion of Bobby Sands. The title, hunger, is both oddly cynical and symbolic. Hunger connotes a desire for food, whereas Sands is intentionally refusing food until he is too ill to even think about it. Instead he is hungering for a higher aim, one that will come after his death.
McQueen’s choice to ignore or gloss over details of Sands’s life, and his unromantic, abstract and unsentimental portrait is a refreshing change from some of the insipid British biopics and historic dramas we’ve seen over the years, but it backfires. There is no dramatic structure, no character arc, and despite Fassbender’s excellent acting and courageous physical transformation, including weight loss, no one we know well enough to care about.
Since the action in part three begins on day 18 of the hunger strike, we don’t know that a week after entering the hospital Sands was nominated as independent MP at the Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election. Nor do we learn that for the first 17 days of the hunger strike Sands kept a secret diary written on toilet paper. We don’t see Bobby learning Gaelic and teaching it to his fellow inmates. We don’t learn why Gilley and Campbell play so prominent a role in part I when the second hunger striker to die – a week after Sands -- was Francis Hughes who isn’t mentioned at all.
If McQueen wanted to make a universal, non-political film that, too, backfired: the film is a polemic. McQueen shows the unclothed, unarmed prisoners beaten mercilessly by monstrous English paramilitaries or guards. While this brutality was and is a national disgrace, it might be significant to have mentioned that a majority of the 2,000 plus dead of the period were murdered by republicans. Lohan, the English guard, and the young paramilitary policeman we see trembling in tears, are portrayed as remorseful, troubled souls, executing orders for a paycheque devoid of the principles and altruistic sacrifices that fuelled their prisoners cause. In short, they are the Roman army officers who, too late, realise they are in the presence of a saint and not a terrorist. When a nasty prison guard is assassinated, it seems just revenge not murder, and the hit man is not associated with the political prisoners we’ve met.
When asked why he wanted to make this story 27 years after Sands’s death (and it wasn’t because Sands was 27 when he died) McQueen draws comparisons between The Maze and Guantanamo Bay and Abu Graib. The ‘debate’ with the priest about alternative ways of achieving peace is doomed as there was only ever one side written. Teenage boys from Iraq to Venezuela who never heard of Sands might watch a DVD of this film thinking, here’s another innocent victim of Anglo-American torture and carnage. The 18-25 demographic group will not remember that the violence on both sides and the hunger strike that killed ten men did not end the troubles. It would take another 13 years of violence before the weakening of the IRA and public disgust with the murder toll eventually led to a ceasefire.