Film and Video

The Film/Video director’s files. Where to begin? Perhaps in starting, it would be appropriate to explain just what exactly these elusive files are. The director’s files consist of nine large and four small drawers in the office that house hundreds of manila folders. There is one folder (in some cases multiple) for each director with whom the Walker has been in contact or has had any relation with. So, since the beginning of the files (which I assume was in the 70’s), oodles of newspaper clippings, letters, and other seemingly pertinent items have been placed in the files. Also since the beginning, a plethora of, well, junk (like copies of copies of articles, “while you were out” slips for past curators, etc.) has been added.

Over the course of the past five months, I have worked on unearthing the contents of these drawers. To be fair, they have been worked on for nearly three years, but I as an individual have only been with them for nearly half a year. In the beginning, it was arduous, even dreadful. Imagine having nine large, mostly unorganized drawers housing dusty, potentially very important or very meaningless content staring you in the face every day. Initially, I thought of the task of cleaning out the files as busy work, as something nobody else wanted to do, therefore intended to keep the intern occupied, while cleaning out the beast that no one else had the time to touch. But luckily, I was wrong. I was terribly, terribly, wrong.

My assignment for the content itself was quite simple-discard any print outs from the New York Times, IMDB, or any other document that is easily accessible online, put aside any direct contact, photo or correspondence with the director to be archived, and keep anything else in the folder. I then replaced the bent manila folders with shiny new ones, labeled them, and maintained/restored the alphabetical integrity.

Last week, after having graduated, I had a new burst of life. It was weird, really, because I assumed that graduation, just like birthdays, would do nothing for me-I wouldn’t feel older or smarter, but would simply keep on keepin’ on with my usual life-but that wasn’t the case. I was extremely motivated to accomplish something, anything (as if a diploma wasn’t object enough) and set my sights on the director’s files. I figured that since they had been worked on for three years with little progress, I was going to be the one to plow through and put my organizational competency (and/or slight OCD) to good work.

What I found was a new yet old aesthetic. I found pieces of history-letters typed on thin onion-skin like paper, photographs, and postcards-from some of the greats such as Maya Deren, Elia Kazan, and Bruce Conner. It really was quite beautiful sorting through these documents, these passing notes of history that still remain. There was something very meditative and methodical about cleaning the drawers, and something that verged on the edge of sad. In handling these carefully crafted artifacts, I realized that the art of the letter is nearly gone. Almost every transmission between the artist and the Walker up until the 1990’s was via letter or postcard. An air exists around these letters of thoughtfulness and sincerity that seems lost in the era of e-mail and constant communication.

It took me just over a week at full throttle to complete the files after chiseling away at them for some time, and strangely enough became saddened as I finished the last drawer. It felt like the end of an era as I put the last folder away, felt as though I just sorted through the last of the sincere. But as I ended my romanticized soiree not only with the files but with history, I realized that because these documents exist here, they not only serve as an aesthetic art form in themselves, but are true artifacts of the past and what is yet to come in the future.

So what I leave you with is a few things. One, think about extending yourself past an e-mail and writing a letter, whether small like a postcard or grandiose like a diligently crafted letter composed on an old typewriter. And two, since I did not know how long the director’s files would take me, I decided to extend a similar unknown to this blog by creating a series of posts (whose length is currently undetermined) that will document in pictures and vivid recollections a few specific encounters I had with the director’s files.

Who Are You, Polly Magoo?

As Rob Nelson mentioned earlier this week, the Walker has held a sizeable portion of William Klein’s films in our Ruben and Bentson Film and Video Study Collection. Some of the prints often go out on loan to other organizations, but there are several cans of film that have remained fairly untouched on the shelves for quite some time. We have a can of film in our archives here that we have long understood to include clips and camera tests from some of William Klein’s feature films. Heading into the Regis Retrospective, we decided to take a closer look at the content of this particular can. What we discovered was not the clips and tests we expected, but actual theatrical trailers for several of Klein’s features, and they are in excellent condition with perfect color. Film trailers can often be interesting in their own right, but in the case of someone like William Klein, they can take on a life of their own. Klein involves himself in every aspect of his films. From the actual photography all the way through the graphic design of the promotional materials, his hand is intrinsically there. These trailers amplify that phenomenon incredibly and become films of their own in some fascinating ways. If you were able to catch Tulpan last weekend, you likely caught the trailer for Who Are you, Polly Magoo? We’ll show that one again before the screening of Mr. Freedom this Friday. The trailers for Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther and Muhammad Ali the Greatest will be played before the screenings of Who Are You and Messiah this weekend. These trailers are such a treat, and they will knock your socks off. As rare as William Klein screenings are, these trailers are even moreso. Don’t miss them.

William Klein

“In and Out of Fashion” is the ideal name for a William Klein retrospective, not only because the filmmaking photographer has kept an eye on haute couture throughout a career of six decades and counting. Often underappreciated (if not by the Walker, which mounted the first-ever Klein film program in 1989, and has played host to its reels ever since), the confrontational shooter is now ready for his close-up. We might think Klein’s U.S. audience would’ve taken more strongly to his satiric critique of The American Way at some point during the past eight years, but, blessed as we are with eight Klein features (all in 35mm), a shorts program, and the man himself (on June 26), we’ll simply agree the party is better late than later.

In any case, it isn’t hard to see why most any Klein biographer will observe that the born New Yorker’s remove from the mainstream — growing up Jewish in an Irish neighborhood, moving to France after serving in the U.S. Army during WWII — fueled his dual interest in American outsiders (subjects of appreciative documentaries) and insiders (objects of scorn in his satiric fictions). Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (May 16 at 7:30 p.m.) — the best known (and best) of Klein’s narrative films — has Klein biting the well-manicured hand that had fed him fashion shoots; the first scene, unapologetically crude, finds a bevy of female models wrapped in (and cut by) aluminum siding. Pointedly one-dimensional as well, the title character of Mr. Freedom (May 15 at 7:30 p.m.) — a costumed superhero for the fascist cause, dark as the Dark Knight — is introduced busting an African American family at dinnertime (and much worse). Strike a pose; be The Man.

If these, along with The Model Couple (May 29 at 7:30 p.m.), constitute what a Criterion Collection box set calls Klein’s “delirious fictions,” his trilogy of documentaries about variously oppositional African Americans — Eldridge Cleaver, Little Richard, and Muhammad Ali — forms the core of his equally intoxicating nonfiction. Far and away the greatest of these is, well, The Greatest (June 6 at 7:30 p.m.), a two-part portrait that devotes an hour each to Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali — the same man, of course, yet separated here by ten years, a load of punches, and countless pages of history. (Subtitle it Out of and In Fashion?) Divided into segments shot during 1964 and 1974, the film captures the boxer’s radicalization around the time of his two early Sixties bouts with heavyweight champ Sonny Liston — a shift that led to Clay’s adoption of the Black Muslim moniker Muhammad Ali.

The Greatest certainly looms large here (”I predict that tonight someone’ll die at ringside from shock!” he exclaims before the rematch with Liston), yet Klein doesn’t just stick to the men in the ring. Delving into the business of fighting (the artist was acutely interested in American advertising wherever he found it), Klein trains his camera on the fans, the odds-makers, the moneymakers, the commentators (including Malcolm X, in one astonishing scene), and the ’60s-era white managers who hold a repugnantly proprietary view of the fighter. (Small wonder the film invokes slavery within its first five minutes, as well as inserting Godardian cutaways to billboards as a reminder that all this brutal humanity is bought and sold.)

By 1974, part of what has changed is that Don King has gained the juice to act as promoter, and that Ali’s fight against George Foreman in Zaire is as much about Black Pride as about boxing. (The racial power of the event can’t be denied: Just two years later, Sly Stallone was moved to deliver the retaliatory Rocky.) Likewise, Klein views the sporting per se as somewhat incidental to the context around it, rendering the bouts in a brilliantly abstract flurry of still photographs whose subliminal force anticipates Raging Bull. Such sequences are undeniably potent, and Ali may indeed have been The Greatest in his field, but it’s outside the ring that Klein and his subject each manage to float and sting.

In Michael Koresky’s liner notes for the Criterion box, the filmmaker is quoted on the subject of Mr. Freedom’s radical irony. “A lot of French critics said [Freedom] wasn’t realistic… But now, if you want to win an argument about a film, you can always say it’s a comic strip.” Helluva point, and it applies equally to what I’d call Klein’s other greatest film, Messiah (May 17 at 2:00 p.m.), which brings a fanciful panel style to the librettos of Handel’s oratorio, if not Christianity in sum. Hmmm…what would Jesus write? Let’s start by saying that anyone intolerant of the nonnarrative Koyaanisqatsi method of wedding classical or “classical” music to contemporary images — or of the notion that an atheist Jew such as Klein would dare to fiddle with a text as divine as Handel’s — will need more than a Christian capacity for forgiveness just to make it past reel two.

When Messiah was released almost a decade ago, Klein disciples were heard to preach to the unconverted, urging them to consider the film’s global-village street scenes in relation to all that’s holy. When Klein puts a shot of worshipful Las Vegas gamblers over the lyric “Behold your God,” we’re meant to note that casinos are modern temples whose congregations are in desperate need of redemption. (Not exactly a novel sermon, this.) Elsewhere, Klein goes looking for God in billboard ads and conjures somewhat subtler juxtapositions, as when “The government shall be upon his shoulder” is sung by an African-American inmate choir; the crime-busting drills of Dallas cops are matched to “He taketh away the sins of the world”; a montage of war-atrocity images accompanies “Let us break their bonds”; and high school kids smoking cigs during recess suggest that we, like sheep, have “gone astray.” (Is the similarity between “astray” and “ashtray” intentional?)

For Fellini enthusiasts, the surreal sight of Bodybuilders for Christ snapping aluminum pans like toothpicks leaves little doubt that Klein once worked as an assistant to the director of Satyricon. And aficionados of the oratorio might relish the symmetrical relationship between this postmodern movie and Handel’s own multinational pastiche of old and new, or between the Paris-based, expatriate American Klein and Messiah’s 18th-century librettist Charles Jennens, described in one CD’s liner notes as a “pompous, conceited, and fabulously wealthy man of leisure.”

Dogmatic by definition, Klein’s Messiah is not unlike a Kevin Smith satire for the museum crowd — and not without value nearing Father’s Day, either, as it commands some of the more unreflective among us to ponder the holiday in a manner that doesn’t necessarily include a trip to the megamall. Still, for Klein’s first visit to the Twin Cities in two decades, one can’t help but wonder: Might the 81-year-old be coaxed to the Mall of America? With camera in tow?

The “Legendary William Klein”. You have never heard of him?

Start with this interview:

If you don’t have time, continue.

Have you ever seen the photograph of a model, fifties black eyeliner, painted nails, flowery hat and the face obscured by smoke wafting from the cigarette in her fingers? The one you know is from Vogue, without being labeled?

You probably know this image without knowing the man behind the camera. This “brainy and pugnacious” artist made a good living with these images, (as well as commercials) but he never stopped taking shots at the fashion industry. He made two films, just to set the record straight – exposing the vapid nature of the fashion model in Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo?) in 1966 and in 1985 in with Mode En France. (The Walker program also includes a documentary In and Out of Fashion -covering all his work.)

But what is his legacy? Legendary? Surfing the world between being the artist creating fashion images and the street photographer of raw reality; or between the auteur of non-narrative image films, gritty documentaries capturing the Zeitgeist of the revolutionary sixities, and socially critical pop-narrative films. His work is all over the place, and the influence it had is equally pervasive, even if you don’t know the man behind the camera.

His first feature film job as so called “co-director” as he says, was with Louis Malle on Zazie dans le Metro, giving it style Malle didn’t seem able to maintain without Klein. He was a friend and cohort of Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker. Name dropping without context can be frustrating, but Klein and this whole generation of French filmmakers made an indelible mark on the next generation of filmmakers – both popular and independent, Terry Gilliam and David Lynch certainly spring to mind. Marker also published Klein’s first book of photography. These French filmmakers were Klein’s contemporaries and co-conspirators in the sixties.

Without Klein’s Mr. Freedom (1969), I would argue, we might not have Robocop, Rambo, or even Iron Man. The image of the shoulder padded (or buff) male figure crashing through a wall in the name of self-righteous American values, bigger than life. This parody and social criticism – created during the upheaval and revolutionary sixties-has remained relevant, as Klein mentions repeatedly, thanks to Bush’s ascendancy.

Obscure as Mr. Freedom may be, in 1999, singer Beck paid tribute in his music video for the song Sexx Laws (pay attention to Jack Black in the opening sequence)…

His film The Model Couple, might be interpreted as a precursor to reality TV – “With televised fanfare and an overabundance of scientific zeal, Jean-Michel (Andre Dussollier) and Claudine (Anemone) are installed in an antiseptic “happiness capsule,” an apartment in which every aspect of their lives can be monitored.” -described in the New York Times in 1990.

As for his documentaries, he was often astoundingly at the right place at the right moment in history. No one else captured the fervor of the Black Panther and Black Power movement as he did. With Muhammad Ali The Greatest, begun when he was still Cassius Clay, and Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther, filmed when he happened to be in Algiers where Cleaver was on the run. His film on Little Richard captures the musician’s decline, and again, another piece of history.

Broadway by Light and Messiah are both lyrical, driven by music and the motion of the imagery. If you enter the viewing experience without expecting a narrative, or expecting you will be able to verbalize a plot you will enjoy it. Atmosphere and style reign.

Auteur films, as Raymond Durgnat said in a piece originally published in Film Comment, can’t be defined by their plots, but mainly by “atmospheres generated by style.” And in the end, if we give the viewer a rapid succession of interesting images , they won’t care if they get a plot.

Before William Klein himself comes to the Walker, make sure you take advantage of this chance to see his movies. (and maybe do some research about his legacy issue, there is more to be found)

William Klein is coming to the Walker for a Regis Dialogue. He will be talking with Paulina del Paso, filmmaker and associate programmer for FICCO 2009 (Festival Internacional de Cine Contemporáneo de la Ciudad de México).

“There is energy inside this and it’s not artificial energy because it is nature, very natural energy and people feel this-that it is original and original energy.”

–Sergey Dvortsevoy in an interview with Scott Foundas

For a culture addicted not only to social networking, Twittering, and living on a constant schedule, the last thing we believe we have is time. For many of us, time is money, but to some-namely Sergey Dvortsevoy-time is not of the essence, but rather authenticity is.

Tulpan, Sergey Dvortsevoy’s first feature film, has a rare authenticity that most films lack. Rather than focus on effects and high tech cinematic devices, Dvortsevoy harkened his attention to creating an original film set in Betpak Dala (Hunger Steppe) in Kazakhstan. The land is inhabited only by shepherds and the occasional small village. While working for a Russian aviation company, he fell in love with the country side as he flew over across the Steppe. Immediately after, it became his dream to film there, to show the life of solitude, isolation, work.

Some might call it crazy, others impractical. But for Sergey Dvortsevoy, the only way he could feasibly make Tulpan was to settle in and allow the film to take its shape. He did something most filmmakers are not willing to do: wait. And wait they did.

In an interview with Scott Foundas at the New York Film Festival in October 2008, Sergey Dvortsevoy responded to what life was like over the four year process and similarly responded to the topic in an interview in the Tulpan press kit:

Did you and the crew have to live like nomads to shoot this film?

Sergey Dvortsevoy: Although we built our own camp one kilometer away from the set where we had water and electricity from generators the crew lived a life very close to nomads on the steppe. We also spent a lot of time living with local shepherds and with the actors because they already moved into a jurte (traditional tent house) one month before shooting and really lived there together as a nomad family. Samal Eslyamova (Samal) did all the work of a shepherd’s wife and Ondasyn Besikbasov (Ondas) actually worked as a shepherd. A lot of the things he does in the film he experienced during this period himself.

All this was necessary to give authenticity to the film. Ondasyn and Samal had never lived in a jurte before. Samal is from the north of Kazakhstan, where life is much more European. So the shoot was especially hard for her.

Approximately how many shepherds and their families are still living this nomadic existence in the steppe? Are they dying out as more and more young people like Asa move to the city?

Actually there are still a lot of families living like nomads in Kazakhstan. But it’s different compared to the times of the Soviet Union. Very close to the life that Samal and Ondas live in the film, which is considered a modern life. Then there are different kinds of nomads.

Very few have their own livestock. Most are hired by big sheep owners to tend to their sheep and get paid for this in money or in livestock. But they all still live in jurtes in the steppe and travel around hundreds of kilometers a year. Some of them are very poor. What is shown in the film is a realistic portrayal of the current situation. Almost all young people want to go to the city. Because they think they can make good money there. But then you see them in the big city Chimkent for example sitting there waiting for a job they cannot find. So they end up as construction or temporary workers if they don’t have a special profession. People like Asa and Boni would not find what they are looking for.

It appears that the long, often time’s grueling production of Tulpan is paying off. Critics and cinephiles alike are singing Tulpan’s praises. A.O. Scott of the New York Times recently wrote nice piece on the film, which also garnered the honors of Critic’s Pick. As it travels to festivals and art-house cinemas across the country, it seems even more praise is inevitable.

Recently I read a review that compared Tulpan to the works of John Ford. Although I initially did not see the relation (because, of course I immediately thought of John Wayne), it soon made sense. Ford too was keen on potentially tedious shoots, especially in his early works, and the vast expanse of the landscapes is an obvious similarity. It now seems quite natural that he would be compared to John Ford, and in a sense, this is a Kazakh version of a John Ford film, yet the spatial beauty and breath of the characters and land make it so much more.

Tulpan screens in the Walker Cinema May 8th & 9th at 7:30 pm and May 9^th and 10^th at 2 pm.

We are down to our last two screenings of Steve McQueen’s remarkable film Hunger. It’s been an incredible honor for us to present this landmark work of Cinema for its exclusive Twin Cities engagement. For me personally, it was an intense and transcendent cinematic experience, and one that actually surpassed my incredibly high expectations.

Our intern, Emily Hanson had some interesting observations on the film, and I tend to agree that the less you know about this film going into it the better, but you’re here and likely quite aware of what’s been said and written as I was. That said, for further background on the film and filmmaker, you can hear an excellent interview with director Steve McQueen from the CDC/Radio-Canada’s Q podcast. The McQueen portion begins about two thirds of the way into the mp3 file. (Thanks to our amazing (and Canadian) Visual Arts Fellow Andria Hickey for the link.)

We would love to hear your thoughts on the film as well, please let us know by posting a comment.

Sam Fuller's Park Row

Last Friday evening, I found myself enjoying a beverage at a cafe on the river on possibly the nicest day of the year thus far, surrounded by some of the Twin Cities’ illustrious film folk — journalists, bloggers, and fanatics alike. With print media, and especially the film criticism within, struggling to stay afloat, it’s not surprising that the discussion turned a bit to newspapers, and — with the films State of Play (featuring Russell Crowe as an investigative newspaper journalist) and The Soloist (with Robert Downey Jr. taking a turn as a L.A. Times columnist) hitting multiplexes — the newspaper movie. There certainly have been some great ones — His Girl Friday, The Paper, and Sam Fuller’s Park Row are among my personal favorites. It’s no coincidence that Patrick Goldstein of the L.A. Times published an interesting piece on this very topic in yesterday’s paper. (Thanks to David Bordwell for the link.) Mr. Goldstein seems to postulate that the gravity once found in the greatest newspaper films, perhaps like the printed papers themselves, may not find a strong footing with the younger audiences that studios seem to depend on at the box office. It’s an interesting concept to ponder. The mainstream film industry, much like the newspaper business, has an incredible history and deep connections to the American psyche. Both have done so much to shape our culture. In many ways it’s difficult to see both of these industries — though perhaps newspapers more so — struggle to adapt and maintain their ability to define our times, and see the badges of honor that their histories and working methods have earned them become a boat anchor of sorts holding them back.

Steve McQueen is no newcomer to awards and acclaim. Hunger, his latest success and first feature won the Camera d’Or (the award for best first feature) at the Cannes Film Festival last May. In 1999, he was awarded the Turner Prize and will be representing Britain this year at the Venice Biennale. But the acclaim is well justified. Hunger, which screens in the Walker Cinema April 10-26, was made because McQueen wanted to create a film about “an extraordinary world that has become ordinary.” And so he has, in three distinct parts, created a different realm for viewers to enter in and experience the hunger strike of 1981.

Hunger is tactilely-visual, which at times makes the film hard to watch. In an article from the New York Times, McQueen said, “If you see a drop of rain on someone’s knuckle, you feel it because you know that physical sensation. That sensory experience brings you closer to an emotional one.” McQueen has mastered this experience he speaks of. In the opening of Hunger, a guard dips his hands-whose knuckle are covered in freshly opened-sores-in scalding hot water, as the camera pans up to his sullen eyes reflected in the mirror. There is nothing numb about this scene or the movie, for that matter.

Similar to the visuals, the component of sound in the film is absolutely remarkable. McQueen talked about the sound in Hunger in Issue 23 of Reverse Shot:

Reverse Shot: The aesthetic of the film overall is so striking, but perhaps most striking is the care put into the sound design.

Steve McQueen: I spoke to the sound recordist and told him that I wanted him to capture everything. If someone’s finger is tapping on the table, I wanted it. I wanted all the details. Sound, for me, was the most important part of the film because it fills the spaces where the camera just can’t go. A sound can give you the dimensions of a room. It can give you smell, it can give you tension. In some ways sound can travel itself into other areas of our senses, other areas of our psyche that unfortunately cannot be just viewed. Imagine you’re in a room with the lights switched off and you have to feel your way around a room. This is a chair, this is a table, this is a light switch. You have to use your other senses to figure out what you’re looking at. As you’re watching the piece, that’s what I wanted.

The sound design is certainly atmospheric, but it also becomes a bit unbearable at times, though in a paradoxically pleasurable way.

One can talk about the sounds of the baton banging on the plastic shields as being unbearable as such, but that’s what actually happened. It’s raised the tension of the prisoners, but the noise also was a way of rallying the guards. The sound passes on that tension to the audience. Your heartbeat races, your anxiety increases. It’s the perfect soundtrack.

Immediately after I viewed the film, there was nothing I could say, nothing I wanted to say. At that moment, it seemed that any movement, word, description, or analysis would in some way taint what I just experienced.

And so I walked back to my desk speechless and proceeded to lunch-an irony that was not lost upon me. Over the course of my break, I found myself unable to take my mind off of Hunger, an entrancement that extended into the weekend.

I spoke very little about Hunger besides a mere mention that I saw it. A friend asked over the weekend what I thought of the movie, since he had recently read a write-up. All I could say was “You simply need to see it.” For a moment I contemplated extrapolating, but refrained. “McQueen’s praise isn’t for nothing-he is doing something very right,” I said.

There exists a tremendously thin and seemingly tight line in making any remark about the movie. Because of the breathtaking pacing, composition, and camera movement (or lack thereof), it seems instinctual to say the movie is beautiful. But when you step back from your experience (I say experience because Hunger extends much farther than simply a film), you are appalled by the actions and plights of human kind.

Recently in an interview with McQueen, he mentioned how people are shocked when they see the brutality in Hunger, of reliving and remembering what happened in 1981. Not an attempt to justify the happenings both in 1981 and the replication in Hunger, McQueen reminds that events and brutality such portrayed in the film are still happening to this day. He brings up Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

After looking into the history of the Troubles and the 1981 hunger strike, I realized that background information is not necessary before watching Hunger. Because of the film’s structure and attention to every detail, every perspective, part of me thinks each viewer should go in empty handed. To have no prior knowledge of Hunger, of McQueen, of the 1981 hunger strike, the audience is able to then be completely immersed; let it be said, however, that in this day and age, it is impossible to have a completely primary experience. Regardless of how much or little you know, Hunger will be an experience that will be mulled over for some time after.

This said, what is interesting to note is that Hunger is McQueen’s first feature film (previously he was a gallery artist): You should also know that he is about the visceral rather than the technique (he attended the Tisch School for film but left because “It was full of all these rich kids who could afford the fees. It was nothing to do with talent.”) Lastly, you should know that Steve McQueen captures the essence of life and the essence of filmmaking that is lost upon so many and in watching Hunger, McQueen’s vision of history, of art, and of human kind is extended and leaves an imprint in the viewer.

Because of the immensely diverse responses I assume Hunger will create, I would like to offer up this place as a forum to discuss/share your reaction and thoughts on the film.

Hunger screens Friday and Saturday April 10, 11, 17, 18, and 25 at 7:30 pm and Saturday and Sunday April 11 and 26 at 2 pm in the Walker Cinema.

Thanks to the Walker, Hunger will be playing for an extended run in one of the few Twin Cities movie theaters that doesn’t serve popcorn. That observation sounds glib, I’m sure, particularly in light of the film’s grave subject — the slow and painful death, by self-imposed starvation, of imprisoned Irish nationalist Bobby Sands, who died in 1981 after 66 days in protest of the British government. But it’s also true that British artist Steve McQueen’s unusually rigorous, boldly immersive approach to the experiential details of sensory deprivation compels — no, demands — the viewer’s personal adherence to the most elemental human functions, mainly breathing and blinking, give or take thinking. (Perhaps the ideal presentation of Hunger would require ticket buyers to spend 24 hours in isolation before the start of the film.)

So, too, given McQueen’s history in experimental video installation, not to mention the meticulously composed frames of his 98-minute debut feature, Hunger (winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes) may indeed be best suited to gallery display. As the director has said, he set out to capture “what it was like to see, hear, smell and touch” in the Maze prison near Belfast — this to the near-total exclusion of other contextual details such as those Troubles that pushed Sands and his fellow hunger artists to action. The World Socialist Web Site has, along with very few others, voiced its disapproval of the film’s arguably apolitical orientation. But if not even Sands could explain his choices to the satisfaction of a visiting priest — as seen in the film’s bravura centerpiece, a 20-minute debate between skin on bones (Michael Fassbender’s Sands) and a man of the cloth (Liam Cunningham’s Father Moran) — then no movie, McQueen believes, could hope to do it either. So what Hunger does instead is bear witness. And, correct or not, the film’s piercing look at human pain casts an unforgettable spell — akin, at least for me, only to that of Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, and Jarman’s Blue.

As hunger is a fact of life, McQueen doesn’t hesitate to establish it as a universal, if relative, condition. One of the film’s first shots lingers on a hot plate of bacon and eggs — a would-be reward for a prison officer who appears less interested in eating his wife’s home cooked meal than in checking under his car for a bomb. This man, martyr or not, will experience his own deprivation soon enough. Meantime, his opposite numbers behind bars are characterized by McQueen not as representatives or even victims of institutional violence, but as literally starving artists, creatively making use of what little is at hand — namely uneaten prison food and their own fecal matter, materials for finger-painted work that few others could have been expected to see. Until now, that is. If Hunger carries the power of stark revelation, it’s not only for our shocked understanding of the prisoners’ oppression, their selves ritualistically beaten out of them by guards, but our sense that, almost 30 years later, their ordeal has finally earned them a sort of posthumous recognition. In this sense, McQueen is as much curator as artist, as much activist as observer.

With incremental force, Hunger pushes its audience to reckon with some measure of the protesters’ seemingly unimaginable experience. In the aforementioned debate scene, captured in harrowing long take by McQueen, we’re given a chance to wrestle with Sands’s ideas (”Freedom means everything to me”) — but it’s also at this point that the realities of his impending demise begin to sink in deep. Sands helps himself to the priest’s cigarettes while holding court, and, philosophical as his words may be, we can’t help wondering: Do death sticks, in the absence of food, actually nourish the starving body? If so, for how long? Watching Sands’s organs and mind deteriorate in tandem, I began to wonder if a will as strong as his could momentarily feed on hallucination even while, in reality, the starving man continues to resist.

And how long can a movie last without its protagonist’s ability to speak, to hear, to see? Reeling on borrowed time, Hunger’s final passages appear to unfold in some other realm — heaven, perhaps, but not necessarily. Ultimately, the film opens a gallery of the mind — yours. Seems that freedom means everything to McQueen as well.

l-r: Walker Film Curator Sheryl Mousley, Ramin Bahrani, and Associate Film Curator Dean Otto

We had a incredible couple days with Ramin Bahrani here at the Walker and managed to have a quick snapshot taken outside our Cinema. Thanks to all that were able to come out to the screenings and partake in the Master Class on Friday afternoon.