The Cinema of Steve McQueen
A study of space and story.
I first encountered Steve McQueen’s work at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008. The piece on exhibition was a video installation from 2001, “Girls, Tricky.” Cloistered in a soundproof room, bass booming, on a 14-minute loop, a suffocating camera pushes over the trip-hop musician Tricky’s shoulder as he growls lyrics into a microphone for a demo recording of his song “Girls.” The experience is intimate and confronting, a bare assault of body and sound in space. In the long arc of McQueen’s career to come, that encounter would, to this day, illustrate what he does best as an artist and what he struggles with most as a filmmaker.
McQueen’s debut film, Hunger (2008), as much as it unnerved me, did not surprise me. It made good on the promise of that first experience. Like “Girls, Tricky,” Hunger is a study of form and tension in service to an environment. The film recounts the early-1980s no-wash protest and hunger strike of IRA prisoners at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. Michael Fassbender has the breakout role as Bobby Sands, but, as the first prisoner to die of starvation, Hunger is anything but a typical star vehicle. Fassbender barely speaks a line…
