2 McQueen’s art and the politics of memorialisation

Steve McQueen first came to public prominence in 1999 when he won the Turner prize for contemporary art.Footnote ¹⁵ At the centre of his exhibited work on that occasion was Deadpan, a four-and-a-half-minute 16 mm black and white silent, recreating a famous Buster Keaton stunt. In Deadpan McQueen takes the part of Keaton and stares straight out into the camera while the tall façade of a building collapses around him in a shower of dust and debris, leaving him completely untouched as he stands precisely where an empty window frame falls to surround him. In its brevity and black-and-white starkness it has the quality of a pure image of courage in the face of eventual and inevitable collapse, a courage that is all the more striking in that it is played out as a comedy moment. Another early McQueen silent film, Bear, has the artist wrestling with another large man, both men naked. Drumroll has the artist rolling a large tin drum through the streets of Manhattan, filming the reactions of passers-by. McQueen, in short, is primarily known as an experimental film-maker who relies particularly on focusing the attention of the viewer on out-of-the-ordinary situations in which he himself is involved as a participant or actor and which are worked to a kind of super-normal aesthetic pitch through attention to the detail of the scenes, through encouraging an intense almost meditative attention in the viewer by the slow pacing of the changing image, and through the use of silence to sharpen the visual intensity of the sequences. His own presence in the scene serves to localise the action and to implicate the knowing viewer, yet the seeming unnaturalness of each occasion serves to create a kind of critical distance, thereby setting up a dissonance for the viewer between being in on the action and being radically outside it. The effect seems designed to unsettle and intrigue the viewer, but not to alarm or frighten, and there is in each case the sense that what is being explored is the strangeness of human behaviour and the variety of the range of human response.

In 2003, McQueen was approached by Channel 4 with the suggestion that he might make a feature film. For McQueen, perhaps bizarrely given his lack of obvious connection to Northern Ireland, the suggestion somehow recalled his childhood fascination with a TV image of Bobby Sands: ‘it was to do with 1981, and Tottenham winning the FA Cup, the Brixton Riots and Bobby Sands popping up on my TV screen with a number beneath his image. It stayed with me. The seed was planted’ (quoted in Mottram, Reference Mottram2008).Footnote ¹⁶ The quote is typical McQueen; an invocation of the importance of memory that is at once personal and social, connected to a very defined image or very limited sequence of images, and married to a confidence that a form can be found to express this in a way that is both personally true and artistically engaging, in this case eventually leading to the film Hunger. Bobby Sands and his death forms part of a wider social tableau for a young Black boy in Brixton that has little to do with defined political positions, but has something to do perhaps with the idea of the underdog confronting authority (rioting against the police, the hunger-strikers versus the government, and Tottenham weren’t the kind of team who were supposed to win the FA cup).

As if in ironic counterpoint to his decision to make a feature film on Sands’s death, in 2003 McQueen also accepted an appointment as ‘Official War Artist to Iraq’, where he (briefly) accompanied British troops on a tour of duty.Footnote ¹⁷ His eventual artistic project issuing from this experience was the exhibition ‘Queen and Country’, comprising of a set of commemorative stamp sheets bearing the portraits of British service personnel killed in Iraq.Footnote ¹⁸ Discussing this work, McQueen commented that:

In this quote McQueen gives an indication of the artistic sensibility which he brought to what might seem politically incommensurable projects; the commemoration of the British soldiers killed in Iraq and the commemoration through film of the life of someone dedicated to the military overthrow of the British presence in Ireland. McQueen’s declared concern is not with the politics in either case, but with memory and memorialisation of the dead, whatever his or her status, and the importance of the individual life lived as opposed to the political calculation of the value of a life in pursuit of an end. Frequently in interview he has stressed his concern with the ‘humanity’ in the story of Bobby Sands, rather than the politics, and on one occasion elaborated on this idea as follows:

In this attitude McQueen is expressing a familiar non-judgmental ‘artistic’ idea of humanity that ‘nothing which is human is alien to me’.Footnote ¹⁹ However, whatever McQueen’s intention, the idea that a film could be made that would somehow avoid being regarded as political and embroiling McQueen in political controversy whether he wished it or not, is, on the face of it, extremely implausible. It is an accepted fact of political history in Northern Ireland that the hunger strikes represented a turning point in the conflict and one to which a direct line of heritage may be traced from the current political arrangements, the functioning Executive Government of Northern Ireland.Footnote ²⁰ The hunger strikes, in other words, are grandly over-determined as not only political events, but events of such massive political significance that they may be fairly regarded as events of constitutional foundation, in both the general and the legal sense.Footnote ²¹ Not only this, but on the level of local experience the hunger strike period may be taken as a kind of distilled version of the entire ‘Troubles’; the violence, the grand issues of constitutional politics mixed in arguable degree with issues of human rights, the local effects in terms of the polarisation of communities and political opinion, the public displays of certain political positions revealed by later events and histories as postures hiding very different strategies and calculations, a seemingly irresolvable argument between implacable foes.Footnote ²² It was, in short, a time of political ferment which inflamed and polarised Northern Ireland. It was one of those periods of the extended ‘Troubles’ where it was impossible to maintain the everyday fiction of a generally normal society with some trouble around the edges.Footnote ²³ The hunger strike period is not only a site of the genesis of institutional and constitutional reformation, but is also a site of vivid and raw personal memory for the general population who lived through it.Footnote ²⁴

Not only this, but the film was released in 2008 at a time when the issue of remembrance of the past was a hot political topic in Northern Ireland. The ‘Consultative Group on the Past’Footnote ²⁵ (also known as the ‘Eames–Bradley Commission’ after the two co-chairs) had begun sitting in 2007 to review and suggest proposals to overhaul the hitherto piecemeal approach to ‘dealing with the past’ in Northern Ireland, and already certain leaks as to their proceedings had created political furore.Footnote ²⁶ This is an indication of the extent to which Northern Ireland is still dealing with the past as an active element of the continuing present. Sectarian attacks are still fairly frequent, and are the tip of an iceberg of continuing sectarian segregation and tensions.Footnote ²⁷ ‘Dissident’ Republican groups still oppose the constitutional settlement through ‘armed struggle’.Footnote ²⁸ Education is still, in the main, conducted in schools segregated along sectarian lines, and people, in the main, still live in segregated areas.

An extended treatment of the Eames–Bradley detailed report is beyond this essay, but I would like to pick up on a core point of fundamental approach that grounds many (arguably all) of the detailed recommendations within it. The point relates to the following statement, contained in the section on ‘Developing a road map for the future’:

Unpicking the thematic threads of this statement, there are several issues to note. The first is the striking philosophically nominalist view of the past as relative and conditional on the ‘stories’ of those who refer to it. The second is the focus on what might be unkindly termed a ‘pop psychological’ version of the relationship between past trauma and present life, in the reference to memories ‘fester[ing] in the unconscious minds of communities in conflict’. This is connected to the theme of the relativity of truth positions and to the consequent need for story-telling from all sides and for each side to recognise the truth within each other’s stories. In other words, there is a presumption of ‘sides’ to truth, and of truth within all stories. The technique for managing the past is that this truth, or these truths, should be let out into the open air, not for judgement as to its (their) value as truth, but for recognition of the value of the very exercise of ‘truth’ telling. Truth gives way to a process of truth-telling, a kind of psychosomatic tool, a species of ‘talking cure’.

Whatever the merits of this position (and in particular the extension of a recognisably therapeutic individualistic idea to the level of community conflict resolution), there is an implicit core presumption behind even these presumptions as to the relativity of truth, and it deserves serious attention. It is that the past should be bent to the service of the social health of the present, and in particular the future, or, as the ‘key principle’ laid out in the document states:

While on the face of things it would seem churlish to argue with the sentiment behind such a position, there is perhaps too much of an easy move from sentiment to an idea that ‘telling stories’ is the way forward without any working through of a coherent moral framework within which such stories might stand or fall in relation to each other. To translate this moral idea to a formal equivalent in the artistic realm, there is a kind of blind faith in the democratic nature and value of story-telling, without consideration of the idea that some people, for whatever reason, are better story-tellers than others, not to mention that some will certainly reject the idea of experience as ‘story’.

Furthermore, the understanding of memory implicit in such an Eames–Bradley approach has certain ineluctable features. Implicit is that the past somehow owes a debt to the present, the debt of offering up some route to reconciliation.Footnote ²⁹ The past, in other words, is not so much about what happened, but about what we presently need to have happened in order to construct our future. The past becomes an area to be mined to produce some good quality hardcore on which to build. Memory as truth is malleable in the service of a good story of reconciliation. To put it another way, it seems that everyone is being given the responsibility to tell their own story, but a prior condition to do so must be the acceptance of a responsibility that their story and their telling is something that works for the common good. This seems not only philosophically incoherent, but also something likely to be practically unachievable, and therefore opens up as many questions as it resolves. It tries to marry the ethical (ought) questions of responsibility to the ontological (is) questions of people’s memory of their lived experience.

The intention here is not to embark on an extended critique of the Eames–Bradley document, but to highlight the continued significance of ‘dealing with the past’, and to further highlight the complexity and difficulty of finding a form through which this might be achieved, and the likely controversies which will dog any attempt. McQueen’s approach, as already foreshadowed earlier in the discussion of his work in relation to the British war dead in Iraq, is very different from that of Eames–Bradley.

3 Hunger and lingering with the image of humanity

The film is split into three distinct sections. In the first and final sections there is practically no dialogue, while the second section consists entirely of an extended duologue which is almost all shot in a single 18-minute long ‘two-shot’ take, the actors facing each other while the camera remains static. This scene was scripted by Enda Walsh,Footnote ³⁰ and consists of an extended theologico-political debate between Sands and a priest. This scene, as a ‘landmark’ in cinema form (the extended single take), gathered a huge amount of critical attention, but the fact that it was scripted by Walsh while McQueen as director seems to have decided to almost withdraw from the scene, makes it less interesting for this analysis, and so I don’t propose to dwell on it further.Footnote ³¹ The third section catalogues Sands’s progression towards eventual death, principally through a series of slow-paced scenes and images that recall the discussion of McQueen’s art above, yet draw heavily on Christian and in particular Catholic iconography of the Passion of Jesus Christ. Likewise, this section is less interesting for this analysis. Insofar as it relates to the form of image making, this will be discussed in relation to the images in the first section. On the level of ideas the story is simple; Sands completes his hunger strike to the death. The idea of the impact of how this story was told on the reception of the film will be discussed in the conclusion.

The first section of the film deals in parallel with the contrasting experience of two characters. One is a new prisoner arriving in the prison, and the other is a prison officer going about his daily routine of travelling to the prison and starting his work shift. The prisoner adopts the ‘dirty protest’ techniques in refusal of the status of a normal prisoner.Footnote ³² He strips naked before prison guards, is led to his cell, meets his cellmate and is gradually over time introduced to the routine realities of prison claustrophobia and brutality. In parallel to the viewer’s introduction to the realities of the prison through the experience of this character, we are also introduced to the realities of prison life from the ‘other side of the fence’, as we see the daily routine of a prison officer, having breakfast, checking under his car for bombs, driving to work in civilian clothes, changing into uniform, entering into the gang of warders having tea and sharing jokes before they clock on for their shift.

While this opening portion of the film develops a context for what follows, the idea of context here is only obliquely a notion of political context, as this relates to the political situation outside the prison. At one point, for example, one prisoner manages to use a tiny smuggled radio to gain access to news from the outside world about how the political and military struggle is progressing. But the real force of the scenes regarding the radio within the film is that we are shown it being smuggled into the prison by a female visitor who, at visiting time, takes a cellophane wrapped sausage-shaped package out from beneath her skirt and passes it to a prisoner who puts it down his trousers before smuggling it back to his cell where he is shown retrieving it from his anus. The radio is one of many items which are used to illustrate the theme of the rebellious bodies of the prisoners, and their ability to find ways to subvert the rules of the prison.Footnote ³³

The viewer is introduced to these scenes with the new inmate, and the depiction of the physicality is accentuated by the camera periodically adopting the prisoner’s perspective. The viewer is made to recoil with him as he is pushed into a cell and takes in his new surroundings, the shit smeared on the walls in patterns to create a kind of cave art, and out of the darkness looming his cellmate resembling a caveman, naked, filthy, long hair and beard matted and unkempt.Footnote ³⁴ There are horrific scenes of the naked men being beaten by a riot squad of prison officers that recalls scenes of cattle being beaten and prodded towards their death in an abattoir. The zenith of this thematic illustration of the conditions in which these men find themselves (or have created for themselves as a refusal of the condition of normalised humanity as it exists for the prison regime) is a scene in which this prisoner stands at the metal grille which covers the broken window from his cell to the outside and toys with a fly that has come through the window and into the cell (or perhaps hatched as a bluebottle from the maggots infesting the rotting food and shit on the floor). The scene seems to suggest that the prisoner is so abject that even a fly is good company, and the prisoner seems to play with it not in cruelty but in empathy. In a trademark gesture of McQueen’s art, the camera lingers in silence for a long time on this odd and moving interaction.

In a parallel scene the prison officer through whose eyes the film was introduced is shown standing alone in the prison exercise yard, smoking a cigarette as snow gently falls. The camera lingers as the flakes settle down on his grazed knuckles, knuckles that have been picked out previously in several scenes of the film. They were grazed in a horrific scene where he beat the prisoners as he tried to force them to wash, and the impression is given that this is a frequent practice and that the wounds on his hands are practically permanent. The snowflakes settle like a balm on the open wounds of his hands as he stands starkly alone and seemingly alienated even from himself. Only nature comforts him. In the film’s opening scene of his home life his wife is so anonymised that her face is never shown, the crumbs that fall from the table are paid more attention. In scenes with his fellow officers he is raucous and sociable, but to the point where it seems like an act that he is putting on, a mask that he wears. In his final scene in the film he is visiting his mother in a rest home. As he sits trying to communicate with her it becomes obvious that she is in the late stages of dementia, and does not recognise him. A killer walks in and shoots him from behind, his blood splattering the unreacting face of his mother. The overall characterisation (in keeping with McQueen’s declaration, cited above, that ‘I am Raymond …’) seems one of immense sympathy for the plight of this officer who is so dehumanised in his loss of capacity for authentic human interaction, and where this loss of capacity seems brought on by the abnormal and inhumane conditions of prison life.

The context, in other words, is a remarkable context of human ingenuity in the face of extremities of human experience. Men who are imprisoned for terrorist crimes refuse to conform to the definition imposed on them that they are criminals, and in order to assert a different status they embrace a condition of a kind of animality. They refuse to wear prison uniform and so are naked, wrapped only in a single blanket. They refuse to do prison work and so are confined to their cells without rights of exercise or association with other prisoners. They refuse to ‘slop out’ and so smear their cells with their own excrement to diffuse the accumulated shit. They build channels of rotted and rotting food to direct their urine out underneath the doorways and into the prison corridor. Their only concession to the normality of a prison regime is to don clothes so that they can avail themselves of visiting rights, and therefore to a degree of contact to the outside. Such attitudes necessarily create conflict with the guards inside the prison, who react with physical violence against the kind of systemic violence that the prisoners have, paradoxically, managed to inflict on the guards through wresting control over the physical environment; the guards must also live and work in shit and stench. The first section of the film then opens up a context which is not only a kind of super-humanisation in terms of human ingenuity, but also a context of a kind of cyclical dehumanisation. In each case the concern is with what McQueen expressed as his idea of humanity ‘what we, as humans, are capable of … What we will inflict and what we will endure’.Footnote ³⁵

However, even as this broadly narrative element of the film is gradually unfolded, it is important to bear in mind two things, one itself a condition of the narrative and the second a condition of the film-making process. The first is that practically none of this opening narrative development concerns Bobby Sands. It is the parallel story of two men, one a prisoner and one a warder, and the physical and human context in which they live. The connected film-making point is that of how this story is unfolded, in particular as it focuses in on the two men as, on some occasions and to some degree, divorced from the context. Each of these men is offered several striking scenes where we, as an audience, are made to stay with them as they go through the most mundane of actions that are elevated and heightened into something extraordinary by the attention of the camera, by the details of lighting and sound. The prison officer washing his knuckles beneath running water, slowly smoking a cigarette beneath the falling snow, eating a piece of toast. The prisoner stripping naked before the guards, toying with the fly by the window in his cell, trying to masturbate to a tiny smuggled picture as his cellmate stirs on a filthy mattress a couple of feet away. The lighting and camera effects emphasise the darkness and claustrophobia of the environment. There is no dialogue and a focus on periods of silence punctuated by resonantly loud episodes; a clanging prison door, prisoners’ screams, warders’ raucous laughter. The effect is, through contrast, to heighten those periods of silence and to draw the attention to the significance of those mundane tasks; the unbuttoning of a shirt, the smoking of a cigarette. The audience is asked to linger in silence with a heightened sense of the significance of the mundane details of the lives of men trapped in extraordinary conditions. This lingering echoes McQueen’s earlier silent films, and has the quality of creating a kind of secular, humanistic, devotional imagery. What we will inflict and what we will endure are the poles at either end of a much more normal gamut of sensation and endeavour that joins us all just as the former often divides us; the unbuttoning of a shirt, the smoking of a cigarette. In the midst of conditions of absolute horror, McQueen takes time to linger with such images of the banality of ordinary human experience and to remember that it can be beautiful and moving. The form and the idea are merged in the simple act which is requested of the audience: to watch and to wait, to witness and to feel.

4 Aesthetics and transformation

In his review of the film, that is on one level extremely perceptive, the Irish cultural commentator Fintan O’Toole (Reference O’toole2008) regrets what he sees as McQueen’s surrender to the ‘narrative of the hunger strikers’. He writes:

Further in the same review he reiterates and elaborates his point, as a pointed critic of what he sees as McQueen’s political naivety:

There is a very good point here as to the hunger strikes as aesthetic events, even if in making it O’Toole himself is doing some simplifying and transforming of complex political realities. This is true on a simple factual level (not all the prisoners were killers, for example).Footnote ³⁶ On a more complex political level, many Republican ‘terrorists’ would accept that they were victimisers in the sense of creating victims, but it is striking how many ascribe their political commitment to a response to personal victimisation – Gerry Adams, for example, in his autobiography ascribes his political commitment to his family having been forced out of its home (Adams, Reference Adams1996). In other words, the boundary between victim and victimiser is not quite as neat as O’Toole suggests.Footnote ³⁷

There are other simplifications at play here, which lie on the borders of the political and the aesthetic that are traced out by O’Toole himself. He does not want to concede that the hunger-strikers, in performing a ‘work of art’, did something that was positive on a political plane. He can accept the status of their gesture as art, but can only see it as transformative through its ‘obliterative’ power over the political reality of the death of the prison officers. For a cultural commentator and an art critic this seems an odd surrender of the notion of nuance, which is particularly strange in that the move to cast the hunger strikes as performance art is so bold. If the hunger strikes were transformative in an artistic sense, in that they reordered perceptions, were they not also transformative in a political sense that was not merely a negative obliteration, or in a personal sense? The answer to the first of these questions is certainly ‘yes’, in a way that is both totally banal and yet utterly significant. The promotion of Sands as a candidate in a parliamentary by-election, as a deliberate tactic to draw attention to the support his protest had in the wider community, had the ancillary (and well acknowledged) effect of shifting the balance of power within the Republican movement away from the military and towards the political.Footnote ³⁸ In a personal sense there are few who would argue that the movement from murder to self-immolation as a means of protest has at least the virtue of demonstrating the same level of life or death commitment to an ideal without involving unwilling participants in the gesture. O’Toole can’t bring himself to concede that the hunger-strikers could have done terrible things and yet that there was something extraordinary in what they were doing through their protest, or the even more simple point that even as victimisers (or victims) they were human beings putting themselves at the limit of human capability. He is performing his own act of obliteration of a complex relation between aesthetics and politics, a relationship which he himself has exploited in his comments.

In effect, what he is doing is trying (ironically for a cultural commentator) to promote politics beyond aesthetics because of his disapproval of the power of the aesthetic gesture of the hunger strikers, and his sense that any approach to this aesthetic power (such as McQueen’s) has to take the nature of a surrender. What McQueen has managed, however, together with his co-writer, actors and crew, is to plug into the humanity of the hunger strikes, in his own fascination with human capabilities and limits, and to match this humanity with an aesthetic of his own which performs an alternative work of transformation, the transformation of dehumanised figures hidden behind prison walls – and this is not just Sands but all of the characters, whether prisoner or warder – into figures of humanity who are worth remembering, and worth remembering with a steady and slow eye to the detail of their existence. This is an aesthetic based on captivating images and on dwelling with these images in silence.

Unlike the Eames–Bradley Commission then, which strays towards an idea that the dead somehow owe the living a chance to heal, the idea here seems that the living gain a measure of their own humanity by dwelling with the past for a while, by, in the gracious words of another recent commentator, simply bearing in mind these dead (McKay, Reference Mckay2008). Perhaps film as a form which allowed McQueen, and allows generally for, a structure of imagining a past (or a future) but without the need for text ‘shot through with explanation’Footnote ³⁹ and which therefore allows for and indeed calls for and relies upon a range of response, is particularly suited to this kind of work of memorialisation, of marking the fact of memory yet leaving room for that public act to respect the individual community acts that it should somehow constitute and unify.

While the film garnered, in the main, positive critical comment (and many prizes) this is not something that would necessarily indicate that it would have a positive social effect in Northern Ireland. Of note here are two points. The first is that the film was warmly received by Republicans, even ex-hunger-strikers. While for some (such as O’Toole discussed above) this is simply evidence that the film ‘surrendered’ to the Republican narrative, a more convincing point is that the Republican movement itself has now moved to a point where the humanist portrayal of Sands, all but shorn of constitutional political elements, is one that they feel comfortable remembering. The second is that the film opened and ran in Belfast without any protests or demonstrations of any kind. An illustration, perhaps, that the form of memory was, if not something that could be shared equally by all, at least one that was tolerable.

Central to the exploration undertaken in this essay is the idea, not only that everyone has their story, which is of course true, but that the right story be told in the right way, notwithstanding that the person telling the story has no particular right (in that they did not live it) to tell it. Sands’s story was the right story for McQueen, as discussed above, because of the personal imprint of the TV news image that, coming as an element of a time, place and emotional landscape, over twenty years before, planted the seed. The eventual telling is marked, as so much of McQueen’s work, by the dominance of image over narrative, and by a fascination with humanity, with human capacity and human response. The reception of the film would suggest that the film succeeded in striking a positive chord, both in Northern Ireland and beyond, and that the marriage of form and idea somehow managed to express and consolidate an inchoate social idea of just memorialisation.