The Screengrab : hunger

View the Right Thing: Steve McQueen on "Hunger"

billy84 — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:45:00 GMT

View the Right Thing: Nerve intern Billy Gray reports on New York film happenings.

Hunger is about the body, its waste and torments. Excrement smears the IRA inmates' walls in director Steve McQueen's debut film about the 1981 Irish hunger strike led by Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender). Piss is funneled under cellblock doors to flood the hall. Nightsticks rain down on naked flesh. Food is refused to the point of fatal emaciation.

But McQueen (no relation) bristled when an audience member at a recent IFC Center Q& A called it violent. "Show me a summer blockbuster whose death toll and wasted bullets don't outnumber Hunger's," he reasoned. But Hunger's unflinching portrayal of corporal punishment, self-inflicted or not, sears the retinas more than any comic book adaptation's could. It's a testament to McQueen that his debut film will likely force you to avert your eyes.

Such an aversion might make viewers complicit with the British government that McQueen renders through a grave, dismissive Margaret Thatcher voiceover. It's a fitting decision for the director who said the movie is "about the power of the mouth more than anything else. When nothing was going in, volumes were coming out," he explained. Thatcher's interjections are the only times Hunger refers to the ethnic and religious struggles behind the IRA imprisonments and hunger strike.

Shying away from the political, conflict initially revolves around guards and prisoners in Her Majesty's Prison Maze, and brutally so. Inmates are pushed, dragged and clubbed down the block's narrow halls, dunked in ice-cold water and anally probed during contraband searches. It's in one of these sequences that we first meet Sands. Beaten to a pulp, lying naked and supine with his glazed eyes staring at the camera, the audience wonders what further debasement could possibly await him.

Physical abuse gives way to intellectual and spiritual debate in the film's crackling centerpiece. Sands summons a priest to announce his plans for the strike. Over twenty minutes (interrupted by only two cuts) the pair veers between the mundane ("Better than smoking the Bible, ay," the priest asks while Sands enjoys a rare tobacco cigarette instead of his usual substitute, a shredded page from the Book of Lamentations) and the profound. Father Moran points out the futility of the plan and the damage, including Sands' son, it will leave in its wake, but stubborn Irish resolve prevails. "I don't think I'll be seeing you again, Bobby," he concedes.

McQueen saves his most devastating work for the film's final third, which witnesses Bobby's prolonged disintegration. The director said he envisioned Hunger as a silent movie; this act is largely free of dialogue. Instead the viewer observes Bobby's oozing sores, protruding ribs and bloody bowel movements in blue-toned, almost clinical close-up. The intimate, sustained portrayal of Bobby's decline (he died after 66 days; ten fellow strikers followed) avoids fetishism only because of the profound context of dehumanization the films has established—witness a split screen shot of a lone guard sobbing as his peers partake in savage beatings for proof that degradation extends beyond the prisoners.

Hunger's bleak themes and solemn imagery, coupled with the director's video-artist background, distinguish it from standard cinematic fare. But McQueen corrected an audience member at a recent IFC Center Q&A who called it "a work of art." "I want everyone to look at this as a feature film," he said. Veering between lyrical beauty (flashbacks of a young Bobby running through a meadow punctuate his deathbed scenes) and stark decay, Hunger qualifies as both.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: March 7-13, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

(Pictured: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs and Leonard Pierce)

Sláinte! Your friends at the Screengrab are gathering this weekend in Austin for SXSW, and you know what that means! Paramedics will be on call 24/7, particularly since the festival bleeds over into St. Patrick’s Day this year. We’ve already brought you oodles of SXSW-related coverage: Ten Must-See Documentaries (Parts One and Two), Ten Must-See Narrative Films (Parts One and Two), SXSW Explosion, SXSW Reviews: Roadsworth and New World Order, and our Favorite Movies About Music: Non-Fiction Edition (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven). And there’s plenty more coverage to come in the week ahead, assuming the local bars have wi-fi.

Meanwhile, here’s some good stuff to catch up on from the week that was:

Screengrab Reviews: Hunger, Tokyo Sonata

The Screengrab Library of Unfilmed Screenplays: Sam Hamm's "Watchmen"

The Duplicitous Charms of Tony Gilroy's "Duplicity"

Unwatchables: Another 9 1/2 Weeks, Leonard Part 6

A Screengrab Plea: Let Herbie Ride Again!

The Letdowns: Lifeforce (1985)

Screengrab Review: "Hunger"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

The first thing that may strike you as you watch Hunger, British director Steve McQueen's film about the 1981 "dirty strike" and subsequent hunger strikes by IRA members locked up in Maze Prison that ended with ten deaths by starvation, is how aware you of the physicality of the bodies onscreen. You don't have to see a hell of a lot of movies before you become accustomed to the people on screen lacking the weight and gravity of real human beings, and stop thinking of them as being composed of flesh and blood and having nerve endings. That's just a natural consequence of seeing so many films where the people are basically props, and where the heroes can stoically bounce back from any amount of punishment. Somehow McQueen, a gallery artist with extensive filmmaking experience who's making his debut here as a director of features meant for theatrical release, rights the balance, keeping you conscious of the characters' physical powers and limitations, and the effect is disorienting and not a little subversive. It's also harrowing, because Hunger is a movie in which just about everything those bodies experience is unpleasant.

The long, mostly wordless first section of the movie is a visceral evocation of prison conditions, made all the worse by the strikers' decision to try to punish their captors by making their day-to-day existence as bestial as possible. Refusing to wear prison uniforms because they reject being classified as criminals rather than prisoners of war, the IRA men are herded into their cells naked, where they store up their urine to pour under the doors of their cells; one man paints his wall with feces. The movie's nominal hero, Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), has his biggest scene in this section when he resists the guards who are out to cut his shaggy hair and beard and gets into an altercation with a guard (Stuart Graham) who responds in kind after Sands throws a punch at him. It all builds to a scene in which the prison is invaded by the riot squad, who stir up a hellish cacophony banging on their shields with their batons and then use the batons to bang on the prisoners as the prisoners are pulled from their cells and made to run the gauntlet. This is a brilliant, radical piece of filmmaking, and it probably goes on for just about as long as most viewers would be able to take it. ("Most" does not mean the same as "all", and there were a few walkouts during the first half hour when I saw the movie.)

In the brief second act, McQueen shifts gears. This section is a conversation between Fassbender's Bobby Sands and a priest, played by Liam Cunningham, that begins with a single seventeen-make take as the to men lob misdirection and ethical arguments across a table. Whatever this scene introduces into the movie, it's not the feel of real life. Just the opposite: it's a theatrically heightened exchange that may have grown all the more actorish as the Fassbender and Cunningham worked together to make sure they had their lines down so as not to blow the take. (The two of them reportedly moved in together for a while so they could rehearse a dozen times a day.) But after the lack of dialogue in the first act, one latches onto it gratefully. It's there to give Sands a chance to explain his strategy--the hunger strikers begin fasting days apart from each other, so that instead of one big splash in the newspapers, there'll be a steady chain of new martyrs--and argue about the morality of what they're doing. The priest argues that what Sands and his comrades are planning is suicide, plain and simple; he doesn't make much of an effort to argue that, as IRA soldiers, they're already part of an organization devoted to immoral terrorist activity, or that by turning themselves into poster children for the cause they're encouraging more violence, which may have be a key to what makes the film as problematic as it is remarkable, especially when (to my mind) it goes off the rails in the final act.

The last part of the movie is, basically, a death watch. Words dry up again and the csmera looks on as Sands slowly wastes away. He lies in bed looking emaciated, rises and struggles to bathe himself, is visited by a doctor who apparently confirms that he's healthy for a dying man, and goes back to silently wasting away. Fassbender lost forty pounds for this section, and it's painful to watch him here, as it was to watch Christian Bale after he'd starved himself to a skeletal condition in The Machinist. He doesn't have to go through the exertions that Bale did, but once again, McQueen's special focus on the limitations and vulnerabilities of the suffering human body makes you intensely aware of the effort it takes for him just to climb into a tub. I'm never entirely comfortable with this sort of self-mutilation passing for acting, and it's all the more queasy-making here for the way that the movie seems to be nominating Sands for sainthood. The light he's bathed in signals "religious experience"; the near-death flashback to his childhood links his final moments to a story about how, as a boy, he took on the role of scapegoat for those he saw as his brothers. In a recent New York Times interview, McQueen specifically dismissed the idea that the sequence turns Sands into a Jesus figure, saying that " “It’s a naked skinny guy dying — sort of unavoidable. People mythologize it because that’s easier to digest.”

Such statements seem disingenuous, and so does the film's claim to be apolitical. It's an open question whether it's a good idea to make an apolitical film about the death of a terrorist, but for much of Hunger's running time, McQueen succeeds in making it so strong an evocation of pure, painful experience that it can't be easily shrugged off. But are these entirely aesthetic choices, or are they to some extent politically motivated? Are the dialogue sections that deal with Sands's choices about how he's lived his life and fought for what he believes in limited to the argument of whether he has the right to kill himself because audiences might find him less appealing, in a non-threatening rebel way, if he also explained why he thinks his organization has the right to carry out bombings and assassinations? The guard who bloodies Sands up while in the course of barbering him is killed by IRA gunmen while paying a visit to his senile mother in a rest home; maybe this scene is meant to be appalling, but in context, it looks a little like a bullying cop getting what's coming to him. One of the few voices we hear in the opening section is that of Margaret Thatcher, droning on in her sneer of a voice about her refusal to negotiate with the striking prisoners. It's hard to believe that McQueen thinks that playing that voice on the soundtrack, and contrasting it with the prisoners' noble silence, won't automatically get a lot of people on the prisoners' side.

Much of Hunger counts as an extraordinary experience. In its totality, it stands as a warning about the limits of reducing complicated moral and political issues to "experience": whether McQueen admits it or not, his omission of a fuller historical context turns this into a story about men punishing themselves for what they believe in. You may have to be quite the abstractionist to buy into the idea that what they believe in isn't important, and you'd have to be more naive than McQueen might plausibly be not to see that it's almost implicit in the scheme of things that the cowering, naked prisoners must be right and the baton-waving officers who represent the government led by the woman with the Wicked Witch voice must be wrong. It's not the movie's choice of sides that bothers me; it's the way that it presents itself as being above taking sides while it's clearly doing just that. And it punishes the audience (and trashes the issues it raises) in the last section; the transmutation of Bobby Sands into a plaster saint is a conceit unworthy of the artist that McQueen shows himself capable of being earlier in the movie. In a movie culture starved for real daring, Hunger is a real achievement and not to be missed. But it's also not to be swallowed whole.

Related: Trailer Review: Hunger

The Rep Report (March 6 - 12)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

CHICAGO: The first annual Chicago International Movies and Music Festival has begun and runs through Sunday. The movie half of that equation includes documentaries and videos featuring Bonzo Dog Band/Monty Python/Rutles mainstay Neil Innes (The Seventh Python), Sonic Youth, the New Pornographers, Feist, Elliott Sharp, and the underground music scene of Beijing. Feature films include Punching the Clown, a comedy in which satirical singer-songwriter Henry Phillips plays a version of himself trying to break into the Los Angeles music scene, and Lech Kowalski's East of Paradise.

NEW YORK: BAM pays tribute to IFC Films, a major force in the distribution of indie and international cinema that may have just gotten a little more major in the wake of the death of New Yorker Films. The program concentrates on recent films from overseas now being released here through the auspices of IFC, beginning with British artist-turned-director Steve McQueen's controversial Hunger, Hong-Jin Na's debut thriller The Chaser, and two films starring Louis Garrel, Christophe Honore's La Belle personne and Phillipe Garrel's Frontier of Dawn.

Hot on the heels of Anthology Film Archive's matched double bills of films by John M. Stahl and their remakes by Douglas Sirk, Film Forum uncorks Stahl's most overblown slice of stormy emotions, Leave Her to Heaven, a movie that bursts the chains of melodrama and gallops happily into the territory of Gothic black comedy. As the scary heroine, Gene Tierney watches people drown and uses a flight of stairs and the miracle of gravity to deal with the news that she's pregnant; Whatever she's doing, whatever is going on around her, Tierney gives the performance of someone whose director has promised her a lollipop if she can make it through the scene without changing expression. The movie is playing for a week in a glossy new 35-mm. restoration.

Trailer Review: Hunger

Paul Clark — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Steve McQueen’s debut feature has been getting raves ever since it first premiered at Cannes last year, where it took home the Camera d’Or. Since then, the film has built up sizable word of mouth among serious critical types, not only for its unflinching portrayal of the 1981 hunger strike by imprisoned IRA leader Bobby Sands (which would surely explain why Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions is distributing), but also for the artistic rigor which McQueen brings to the film. Visual-artists-turned-directors have a somewhat spotty record, but word is that McQueen’s work is closer, quality-wise, to Julian Schnabel than, say, David Salle. Overall, I’m pretty taken with this trailer, not only for its imagery but likewise for its minimalist score, perhaps the best example I’ve seen since Eyes Wide Shut. I’ll finally have the chance to see the film later this spring, but this trailer has racheted up my anticipation for the movie itself.

Cannes Rundown- The Winners!

Paul Clark — Mon, 26 May 2008 02:24:00 GMT

Laurent Cantet’s The Class (Entre les Murs) won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, an award that was bestowed on the film earlier today. A last-minute addition to this year’s Competition lineup, Cantet’s film took home the top prize in a year that saw a number of notable titles but no clear frontrunner. The Class was announced as a unanimous Palme winner, and was praised by jury president Sean Penn for its “generosity.”

Due to Penn’s political leanings, many predicted Steven Soderbergh’s Che to be a contender for the Palme, but the film had to make do with a Best Actor award for star Benicio Del Toro. Taking home Best Actress was Sandra Corveloni for Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas’ Linha de Passe.

Here’s the complete list of winners:

Palme d'Or: Entre Les Murs (The Class), directed by Laurent Cantet
Grand Prix (runner-up): Gomorra, directed by Matteo Garrone
Prix de la Mise en Scene (best director): Nuri Bilge Ceylan for Three Monkeys
Prix du Scenario (best screenplay): Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne for Le Silence de Lorna
Camera d'Or (best first feature): Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen
special mention: Ils mourront tous sauf moi, directed by Valeria Gai Guermanika
Prix du Jury (jury prize): Il Divo, directed by Paolo Sorrentino
Prix d'interpretation feminine (best actress): Sandra Corveloni for Linha de Passe
Prix d'interpretation masculine (best actor): Benicio del Toro for Che
Prix de 61st Festival de Cannes: Catherine Deneuve (Un Conte de noel) and Clint Eastwood (The Exchange)
Palme d'Or (short film): Metron, directed by Marian Crisan
special mention: Jerrycan, directed by Julius Avery

Two Controversial Homecomings

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Americans are often so wrapped up in the kind of navelgazing prompted by our own entertainment industry that we forget how foreign countries are more than just markets to which we can ship our films for extra box office juice. The history, culture and politics of every nation has a powerful effect on how they react to cinema, and two stories in the Guardian illustrate the continuing ability of film to heal old wounds -- or open them up again.

Polish director Andrzej Wadja already had built up a stellar reputation, and at age 80, seemed likely for a future when he would simply be remembered as one of the last of a well-regarded generation of Polish filmmakers. Wadja, however, isn't ready to bow out gracefully, and indeed, has very likely made the film that will be remembered as his greatest. Katyn, which tells the story of the massacre of over 20,000 Polish soldiers slaughtered by Soviet troops in the eary days of the Second World War, has already been hailed as a great cinematic acheivement, scoring an Oscar nomination and heaps of praise for its skill, emotion and uncompromising approach wherever it's played; but for Wadja, it was more than just an artistic endeavor. His father was one of an astonishing eight thousand Polish officers killed at Katyn, with an eye towards permanently crippling Poland's military class in order to preemptively shatter resistance to Soviet rule. The massacre has been hugely controversial since it first happened; the Nazis exploited it in order to portray themselves as an acceptable alternative to the Russians, the Russians themselves attempted to blame it on the Nazis and obfuscated its details for decades; and the Americans and British helped cover it up in order to preserve their wartime alliance with Russia. All of which begs the question, will Katyn play in Russia? Andrzek Wadja vows that it will, saying that while he has yet to find a distrubutor there, "the film is not against the Russian people. It is about the horrors of the Stalin regime. It is enormously important for this film to be shown in Russia if Polish-Russian relations in the 21st century are to be based in truth, not lies."

Closer to the Guardian's home, visual artist, Turner Prize winner, and no-relation-to-the-Great-Escape-star Steve McQueen is debuting Hunger, his dramatization of the death of notorious IRA political prisoner Bobby Sands during a hunger strike. Although early reports are that it's well-acted (with 300's Michael Fassbender as Sands) and inventively directed, the production -- partially funded by Channel 4 -- is already drawing detractors from all sides, many of whom haven't had a chance to see the film. Some IRA members, like Richard O'Rawe, the organization's press officer at the time, worry that the film doesn't show Sands' struggle in a greater contrast (Sands was a dedicated liberal who wanted to see a socialist Ireland). Others, like Jeffrey Donaldson, an Ulster Unionist MP, decries the whole notion of making such a film about the IRA, worrying that it's little more than glorifying terrorism. While it seems likely that the film is going to draw criticism from all sides of the issue, McQueen says there's no better time than now to make the film: when he begane working on it "at the beginning of 2003 there was no Iraq War, no Guantanamo Bay, no Abu Ghraib prison, but as time's gone by the parallels have become apparent. History repeats itself, lots of people have short memories and we need to remember that these kinds of things have happened in Britain."

Cannes 2008: Late-Breaking News!

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:19:00 GMT

One week ago today, the Cannes Film Festival powers that be unveiled this year's selection of films in Competition. But while there was plenty on that list to get excited about, it seems they weren't finished, as today they announced three more selections in the official Competition lineup.

True to form, one of the latecomers was a French entry, and it proved to be a pretty interesting choice: Entre les murs, the latest film by celebrated filmmaker Laurent Cantet, whose previous works included the 2000 film Time Out. Another American film was added today as well- Two Lovers, the latest from We Own the Night's James Gray, a Cannes favorite. Two Lovers, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow, is said to be a romance, making it something of a change of pace for Gray, who has to date specialized in crime stories.

But the big news today was the announcement of this year's opening-night film, Fernando Meirelles' Blindness. The film, which stars Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, will screen in competition, with its pedigree the hope is that it improves on the dicey precedent set by recent Cannes openers such as Fanfan la Tulipe and The Da Vinci Code.

Added out of competition was the opener of the festival's Un Certain Regard sidebar, Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen (no, not that one). Finally, the closing film of the festival was officially announced as being Barry Levinson's What Just Happened?. Sadly, this star-studded film (the cast includes Robert DeNiro, Bruce Willis, and Robin Wright Penn) is a Hollywood satire, not a big-screen adaptation of the long-forgotten sitcom Wha'Happened?. So all you Mike LaFontaine fans in the audience will be sorely disappointed.

But wait, there's more! Two more names were added to the Official Competition Jury (also announced last week), which brings the jury up to nine members. The additions were French actress Jeanne Balibar (who worked with fellow jury member Sergio Castellitto in Va Savoir)...

... and Iranian writer/director Marjane Satrapi, who directed last year's Jury Prize-winner Persepolis and collaborated with jury prez Sean Penn on the English-language version of the film.

The Cannes Film Festival will be held from May 14 through the 25th.

The Rep Report (April 15--21)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: The coolest noise in town this spring and summer may be at the Museum of Modern Art's "Jazz Score" series (April 17--September 15), which offers "a gallery installation, live concerts, and a panel discussion," as well as a series of features and shorts powered by original jazz soundtracks. Whether by design or just the luck of the draw, the selection makes it clear that the use of an original jazz score, whether composed by Duke Ellington (Anatomy of a Murder) or Elmer Bernstein (The Man with the Golden Arm), reveals a certain level of artistic aspiration, often coupled with a lust for the lower things in life. At the simplest level, music by Miles Davis or by John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet can do wonders for a thriller such as Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows or Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow, with Robert Ryan as a racist crook and Harry Belafonte as his unhappy partner in crime. At the other extreme, there's Arthur Penn's Mickey One, a fascinating, incoherent, art-damaged movie that seems to be trying to take its cues from Stan Getz's saxophone improvisations on the soundtrack--bad as the movie is, it's fun to watch just for the visions it gives you of the studio executive's heads melting when they first saw it--and such artifacts as Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy, with music by Ornette Coleman, and Shirley Clarke's off-Broadway verite films The Cool World and The Connection, reminders that the American independent film movement once seemed to be an offshoot of the Beats' world. There are also some international obscurities that sound better than intriguing, notable Dilemma, a 1962 film made in apartheid-era Johannesburg by the Danish director Henning Carlsen (Hunger), starring Zakes Mokae and with music by Max Roach.

LOS ANGELES: Tonight, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ "John Huston Lecture on Documentary Film" at the Linwood Dunn Theater will include screenings of the two great military documentaries that Huston made during World War II, The Battle of San Pietro and Let There Be Light. Although made with the cooperation of the U. S. military and officially intended as part of the war effort, San Pietro--which is both a strikingly clear and cogent account of a battle and a nonfiction war poem composed on film--met with some grumblings from the higher-ups, and Light, a harrowing visit to a medical ward full of soldiers suffering from the psychological effects of war, was actually kept from public view until the early 1980s. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Susan King makes the point that Huston had to deal with much more interference than some of the people now making documentaries about the Iraq war, but many of those current filmmakers could still learn a lot from his work. She also reminds us that Huston had a ready answer for the jarheads who clucked that his movies seemed "anti-war': ""Whenever I make a film that's for war, you can take me out and shoot me." The screening will be introduced by Huston's son Tony and followed by a panel discussion including Dr. Charles Wolfe, Dr. Betsy McLane, and Richard E. Robbins, the producer-director of the Oscar-nominated doceumentary Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.