Hunger
Directed by Steve McQueen
Starring Michael Fassbender, Stuart Graham and Liam Cunningham
Specially reviewed at the London Film Festival and on general release later this month
‘HUNGER’ cuts out the melodrama and gets straight to the point about life for a Republican prisoner in the H-Blocks.
Steve McQueen’s stated aim with his film is to convey on the screen ‘something that you cannot find in books and archives: the ordinary and extraordinary of life in this prison.’
The film centres on the struggle for a principle, the right of Irish Republican prisoners to be treated as such in a British concentration camp, the notorious H-Blocks, opened to house them when the war escalated between the British army, sent to occupy the north of Ireland in 1969, and the IRA.
The then British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, refused their demands and said they must be treated as criminals.
This was after British imperialism had unsuccessfully tried to crush the nationalist movement in the early 1970s with internment.
The prisoners demand political status and begin a ‘blanket protest’, when they refuse to wear prison clothing and are left with just a blanket to wrap themselves in.
This is followed by a ‘no wash’ protest.
Terrifying beatings by prison officers and a gauntlet of riot police puncture the silence in McQueen’s sparse and bleak recreation of the H-Blocks.
Ex-Republican prisoners who have seen the film have said that in many respects it is an accurate recreation of the extreme conditions they lived under, but that the camaraderie of the Republican PoWs is missing.
After a beating, prisoners would often start singing Republican songs to show their defiance.
Turner Prize-winner McQueen himself says that: ‘It is important to me that the events are shown through the eyes of both prisoners and prison officers.’
He adds that when the idea for his first full-scale feature film was conceived, ‘there was no Iraq War, no Guantanamo Bay, no Abu Ghraib prison, but as time’s gone by the parallels have become apparent.
History repeats itself, lots of people have short memories, and we need to remember that these kinds of things have happened in Britain.’
The film opens to the sound of pan lids being beaten on the road – a well-known warning in the north of Ireland that the British troops were coming.
A man is standing in his bathroom, placing his scarred hands in the wash basin.
He is shown repeating this ritual several times, each time his knuckles appear redder.
(The film soon reveals how he gets those marks, by beating Republican prisoners).
In close-up detail, the film shows the tension and anxiety written on the man’s face, checking his car for booby traps before he goes off to ‘work’.
A young Republican prisoner enters the Maze prison for the first time.
He has an apprehensive look on his face as he slowly strips in front of the prison governor.
He refuses to take a common prisoner’s uniform and after removing all his clothes is given a blanket and frog-marched to a bleak cell, with walls covered in excrement, with a tiny, barred window.
There is a claustrophobic atmosphere, with no clue as to what is happening in the outside world, except for occasional radio broadcasts of the voice of Thatcher: ‘We will not compromise.’
The young prisoner, Davey Gillen, is already bleeding from the face.
He shares his cell with Gerry Campbell, who has already become battle hardened to the horrific realities of the H-Blocks.
Slops of food are rotting in one corner of the cell, while pools of urine pour from underneath the cell doors into the H-Block corridor.
Prisoners get notes in and out of the H-Blocks by hiding them in their mouths and other body cavities.
There is a chill in the air before prisoners are dragged out of their cells, frogmarched and beaten, and then pinned down while their hair and beards are cut off and they are dumped naked into baths, then dragged away, semi-conscious or unconscious.
A man in a protective suit and mask then hoses down the cell walls.
Bobby Sands has cuts and bruises all over his body, but his face is a picture of defiance.
At the prison chapel, the gabble of prisoners talking amongst themselves drowns out the priest giving mass.
The prisoners are finally issued with ‘civilian clothes’.
But after discovering that they have been issued with ‘clown clothes’, Bobby Sands leads a prison revolt, smashing up all the furniture in his cell.
This provocation sets the scene for the riot police to enter the H-Blocks.
They line-up with their shields like an army going to war, before being inspected by the prison governor.
They start bashing their truncheons against their shields and form a gauntlet along the prison corridor and start screaming.
The prisoners are thrown out of their cells and made to run the gauntlet, as they are beaten with fists and truncheons.
A mirror is placed on the ground and the naked prisoners are then ‘searched’ in the most violent fashion.
One prisoner retaliates by headbutting a guard and he is then relentlessly beaten and kicked by a policeman.
But the torture of the prisoners leads to reprisals on the outside and the prison officer from the film’s opening sequence is assassinated when he goes to visit his elderly mother in a care home.
The film then cuts to a meeting in the prison between Bobby Sands (played by Michael Fassbender) and Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham), in which he informs the priest that he is going to lead a hunger strike in which prisoners will starve themselves until either the British government gives in to their demands, or they die.
Film director Steve McQueen says: ‘Originally, I didn’t want to have any dialogue at all. . . Instead I wanted to focus on the texture of what it was like being there at the time – the atmosphere. . . But then I started to think about there being, after a period of no dialogue, an avalanche of dialogue. A confrontation, a debate. . . I wanted to look at the left and the right of this . . . and I wanted to hold that for a moment and make people think.’
Sands says the only thing left to the prisoners is to use their bodies as a vehicle for protest.
After four-and-a-half years of a no-wash protest, the men feel driven into a corner where a hunger strike is their only choice.
Seventy-five men are ready to begin the hunger strike on March 1, 1981, says Sands.
He will start it and others will follow at later intervals, so that if one man dies, then another will still be fasting, and another will join in, and the strike will continue, if necessary until all the men eventually die.
Out their ashes, says Sands, will come a new generation of men even more determined to free the north of Ireland from British rule.
He tells the priest that the brutality and humiliation and denial of basic human rights ‘has to come to an end’.
He says the Republicans are principled people, ready to lay down their lives for their comrades and their beliefs.
‘Our lives and experience have focused our beliefs differently,’ he tells the priest.
The priest tries to shake Sands from his beliefs, attacking him for wanting to become another martyr.
‘The future of the Republican movement is in the hands of you men,’ he says.
‘My life is a real life, not a theological trip,’ Sands responds. . . ‘It’s a time to keep your beliefs pure. . . A United Ireland is right and just . . . Putting my life on the line is the right thing. I will act. I will not stand by and do nothing.’
By contrast, to Sands’ passionate determination to die, if necessary, for his principles, the voice of then British Prime Minister Thatcher that interrupts the film has the echo of a cold and calculating ruthlessness.
‘They seek to work on the most basic human emotion . . . as the means of stirring the fires of bitterness and hatred,’ she says.
Bobby Sands begins his fast to the death.
(In April 1981 he was elected as a Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. The law was later changed to prevent prisoners standing in elections).
On May 5, 1981, he died, aged 27, after 66 days on hunger strike.
The food placed next to his bedside is like a new form of torture.
Eventually, he has no strength left to put on his bed clothes or to walk.
His stomach becomes completely sunken, his eyes glazed.
He sees a vision of himself as a boy. His mother comes to visit but he can barely see her or hear her as he drifts in and out of consciousness.
He dies with his eyes wide open.
Nine more hunger strikers die before the British government eventually grants some of the prisoners’ demands, whilst refusing any formal recognition of their political status.
Bobby Sands’ death led to massive demonstrations and rioting against the British state in the north of Ireland.
The Hunger Strikes have many lessons for Irish workers today, when a peace agreement has led to so-called power sharing between Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Republican movement, and the British loyalist parties.
But the British state still rules in the north of Ireland and the class struggle between the working class and the capitalist class in both the north and south is intensifying.
Bobby Sands was one of the IRA’s most outstanding young leaders, but his actions reflected an outlook that substitutes the actions of a relatively small group of courageous people ready to sacrifice themselves, for the mobilisation of the masses of youth and workers in a political struggle to overthrow imperialism.
The struggle in Ireland today requires a revolutionary Marxist leadership that can mobilise the masses of the working class.
Bobby Sands represented the most determined trend within the Republican movement that was not willing to bend to imperialism and wanted to take the struggle forwards until it was won and a socialist Ireland established.
This trend rejected the Good Friday Agreement and split from the IRA.
In 1916, the Easter Rising in which the revolutionary socialist James Connolly was one of the main leaders, caught the imagination of the Irish workers and the working people of the world and led to the establishment of the Irish Republic.
The nationalist movement today has ended up in a power sharing British regime in the north of Ireland. It is not a socialist movement for the mobilisation of the working class.
The task of the hour for Irish workers and youth remains to establish a revolutionary party that will unite the working class and lead to the establishment of an independent and united, socialist Ireland.
Large numbers of Irish youth will be inspired by the revolutionary determination and heroism of Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers to do just that.