Hunger · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man in a uniform pushes a squeegee down a long corridor, and a river of urine moves ahead of the rubber blade. The shot holds. Nobody speaks. The work gets done the way work gets done — thoroughly, tediously, with no music to tell you how to feel about it. McQueen lets you watch the whole length of that corridor empty out. By the time the floor is clean you have understood something the film will never say aloud: that the H-Blocks run on labor, and that the protest is also labor, and that both sides are spending their bodies to the last.

Start there, because Hunger is built almost entirely from moments like it — held, wordless, observed rather than dramatized. This is the clearest mark of what Deleuze called the time-image. In the older cinema, the movement-image, a character sees a situation and acts to change it; perception flows into action, and the action resolves the situation. Inside Long Kesh there is no such circuit. The prisoners cannot act in any ordinary sense. They can refuse the uniform, refuse to wash, smear the walls, and finally refuse food — but none of it reaches out and alters the world. What's left is endurance. Deleuze has a precise pair of terms for this: the opsign and sonsign, the pure optical and sound situation, a moment in which a character (and the viewer pinned beside him) can only look and listen because no action is available. The prisoner who has given up everything but his own body becomes what Deleuze calls a seer — a watcher, not an agent. We watch the maggots, the bruised knuckles, the swirls smeared on a cell wall, and we are given nothing to do with what we see except keep seeing it.

McQueen came to film from the gallery, and his real subject is the thing Deleuze reserved for his late work: a cinema of the body. The idea is plain once you have it. Instead of using the body as the instrument of action, the film lets the body carry time directly — its postures, its exhaustion, its rituals hold duration the way a long note holds a sound. The dirty protest is staged as liturgy: the daily, repeated gestures of degradation and refusal, the excrement composed on the walls like abstract painting. Fassbender's Sands in the last movement is almost wordless; his presence shrinks to the fact of a wasting body, and the film asks you to read starvation itself as the action it has replaced. Beside this sits what Deleuze called the gest — a posture that exposes a social relation rather than advancing a plot. The film's quietest cruelty is one: the prison officer Lohan washing blood from his own knuckles, a small private gesture that tells you everything about who has been beaten and who did the beating.

This is also why the cell becomes what Deleuze names an any-space-whatever — a space drained of its function as a setting, broken into affective fragments: a patch of wall, a flank of pale flesh, a corner of filth. It is no longer a room where things happen. It is a field of textures held until they become almost unbearable, which is exactly the threshold McQueen wants. And riding over all this near-silence, at the very start, is the archival voice of Thatcher refusing political status — a real voice of power detached from any visible body, narrating a different reality than the image shows. That gap between an authoritative voice and the wordless flesh on screen does political work no dialogue could.

Then the film does the thing it has spent forty minutes earning the right to do: it fills with language. The long, near-single-take conversation between Sands and Father Moran is the one sustained passage of speech, and it works as what Deleuze called a discourse-image — action transposed into argument, the image posing a problem it refuses to resolve. Is this sacrifice or suicide, reason or zealotry? The scene stages the strike as a contested, reasoned choice and then declines to settle the question. After it, the surrounding montage of bodies hits harder, because now you know the dying is deliberate.

The lineage is exact. The patient, near-wordless attention to hands performing tasks comes straight from Bresson's A Man Escaped, where the body's labor carries the story dialogue would normally carry. The fixed-frame durational repetition of institutional work is Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, transposed into the orderly mopping of a corridor. The treatment of suffering flesh as ascetic passion, stripped of political exposition, is Dreyer's Joan of Arc. Pasolini's Salò taught it to compose excrement as deliberate tableau; Clarke's Elephant taught it to strip Troubles violence of psychology into pure observed process; Beau Travail taught it to make the ritualized male body the film's instrument. McQueen synthesizes all of it into something whole — and, with cinematographer Sean Bobbitt and editor Joe Walker, into a durable house style for the prestige arthouse that came after.

What Hunger did to film is simple to state and hard to do: it moved the political meaning out of the plot and into the body, and trusted you to read it there. Watch it again and watch the labor — the squeegee, the blanket, the slow arithmetic of a man subtracting himself. That is where the film keeps its argument.