- a naked man gets beaten up by prison guards and is forced into a bath tub. this is 40 minutes into the film. we did not get to know this man, he was not introduced to us, we didn't see his personal backstory - the usual means of enabeling the viewer to identify with a person on screen and therefore feel with and for that person are not used in this film. and still we feel strong compassion for him, we suffer with him - because he is a human being (btw: embedding that scene is disabled by youtube, which, i think, is a good decision. one comment says: "How someone could do that to another person.....")
- it made me think about frederick wiseman's documentaries which are always about individuals in an institution
- an institutions becomes helpless when it is confronted with the indestructible will of an individual
- i was surprised to see that the prison guards (=the system) only used pure violence and endurance/stubborness in the attempt to break the will of that individual. no "silent torture" or psychological manipulation was used (at least the film doesn't show it).
- making loud noise brings a group together and gives it power. the film opens with such a moment and the prison guards do it before they beat up the naked man.
from an interview with steve mcqueen: "What was incorporated into the script was when Sands died and there was the banging of the dustbin lids. But that was also a ritual that they did when the army was coming. It was to allow people to know what was going on."
- "Steve McQueen remarked recently: 'It was as if the whole history of the Troubles, and of Britain's relationship to Ireland, was distilled in that moment. It came down to two opposing and immovable forces: Margaret Thatcher and Bobby Sands.'" from an article in the guardian.
reminds me of how stephen frears in "the queen" also focused on one conflict to tell a bigger story. very smart and elegant as far as storytelling is concerned.
- " 'The French government offered the Dublin government two gestures of solidarity, which Dublin declined. One was to boycott the British royal wedding, the other that President Mitterrand attend Bobby Sands's funeral.'" from the same article in the guardian
- "It's striking that Sands had an appeal that went beyond Irish nationalism. The Iranians named the street where the British Embassy is Bobby Sands Street - where, of all things, there is a Bobby Sands Snack Bar.
Yes. They named the street for Bobby Sands, and then the British government changed the entrance to the building to the street behind it. It was the same time as the revolution in Iran, and the mythology of martyrdom in Iran was huge. One of the people whom they took up was Bobby Sands." from an interview with steve mcqueen
- "I was eleven years old, and an image appeared on the TV screen every night, with a number underneath it, and the image was of him, so every night the numbers went up, and as an eleven year old kid the whole idea that, in order to he heard, someone had stopped eating was kind of weird for me. It was an oral situation - food wasn't going in, but the words were getting louder." from the same interview
- "These are people who made their bodies in some shape or form into a weapon. It's always been there. Of course, this is different from 9/11, when airplanes were used to blow up other people. This is someone who was using his body, and not hurting anyone but himself to make a point." from the same interview
- "Only a single 90-second snatch of film exists of conditions inside the H Blocks at the time, shot by an Ulster Television camera crew for a documentary that was subsequently banned by the government. It shows two prisoners, bedraggled and Christ-like, wrapped in dirty blankets, shouting out their demands from a filthy, excrement encrusted cell. From that image, the artist Richard Hamilton created the first work of art based on the H Blocks, a painting called The Citizen, which he completed in 1983. Twenty-five years later, with several former IRA men now sitting in the Northern Ireland Assembly, McQueen has created the second." from another article in the guardian
- "In the final part, in which the skeletal Sands falls into fitful reveries and remembrances, there are hallucinatory scenes of his childhood that struck me as the only false note in a film that otherwise eschews any kind of easy romanticism." . i agree. also from that article in the guardian
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