Reality on the run (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} cahiers_du_2006) wrote,@ 2009-05-17 23:25:00 |
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Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2009)
You could drive a truck through the gaps in my knowledge of the IRA and it's history. In fact you could say that when I think of the IRA I think of: The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, Breakfast on Pluto, and The Wind that Shakes the Barely.
Hunger is brilliant and incisive. McQueen's direction was so good it made me think that the only thing that can save cinema might be if more people from a visual art background turned to feature filmmaking becuase it seems that McQueen understands cinema better, by his first film, than most of today's filmmakers do. A lot of Hunger goes by with little dialogue. Like Kim Ki Duk he tells the story in images alone and like Antonioni he understands space and the frame in telling a story. There's a real sense of the space in which the drame plays out and, on a more political sense, McQueen pays much attention to processes and job functions. Each horrifying thing that the British prison system does is shown as a routine and practiced exercise. Yet at the same time he acknowledges their humanity. Like the prison guard who visits his morther at the nursing home, or the riot cop who sobs in the next room as his buddies savagely beat and forcably seach the naked prisonors.
The scene with the priest - that goes by for nearly 20 minutes in a single shot - is mindblowing. The story and the reasoning and dialogue in it is so tight and smart.
That's all.
You could drive a truck through the gaps in my knowledge of the IRA and it's history. In fact you could say that when I think of the IRA I think of: The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, Breakfast on Pluto, and The Wind that Shakes the Barely.
Hunger is brilliant and incisive. McQueen's direction was so good it made me think that the only thing that can save cinema might be if more people from a visual art background turned to feature filmmaking becuase it seems that McQueen understands cinema better, by his first film, than most of today's filmmakers do. A lot of Hunger goes by with little dialogue. Like Kim Ki Duk he tells the story in images alone and like Antonioni he understands space and the frame in telling a story. There's a real sense of the space in which the drame plays out and, on a more political sense, McQueen pays much attention to processes and job functions. Each horrifying thing that the British prison system does is shown as a routine and practiced exercise. Yet at the same time he acknowledges their humanity. Like the prison guard who visits his morther at the nursing home, or the riot cop who sobs in the next room as his buddies savagely beat and forcably seach the naked prisonors.
The scene with the priest - that goes by for nearly 20 minutes in a single shot - is mindblowing. The story and the reasoning and dialogue in it is so tight and smart.
That's all.
