Northern Ireland from 1976 to 1981.

Long Kesh Prison "The Maze". Since Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher abolished the special status of prisoner for any paramilitary car-cerate of the Irish resistance, inmates belonging to the IRA, now regarded as equal to common criminals, began the blanket strike, i.e., not accepting prison clothes, the dirt strike, refusing any hygienic interventions, covering the walls with excrement, emptying bugs in the corridors and sleeping in cells full of maggots; until resorting to an initial hunger strike followed by one on March 1, 1981, called for by Bobby Sands, leader of the movement.

The first scene of the film describes very well the character of a paranoid warden who lives to enact violent repressions in the prison environment often also assisted by the intervention of special forces to make the violence against IRA rebels even more bloody. Real torture rituals perpetrated against those who in the name of freedom cannot accept rules that do not safeguard their status as political resisters.

The body and its sacrifice are foregrounded, as is always the case in Steve McQueen's films, and as we recall in Shame, subsequent to Hunger, of which he evokes many sequence plans of bodies violated of their freedom, in the first case dictated by sexual addiction, in the second by a need to be free.

A body constrained by an inability to manage its freedom, see Shame, to a body constrained by an inability to enforce it, see Hunger.

A quest, a need to be free that will force Bobby Sands to give himself death through a cruel self-perpetrated hunger strike for 66 days.

To be able to choose to dispose of oneself, one's life and death, sees in this 27-year-old man the martyrdom of the transformation of the body that is consumed in thinness, the formation of ulcers and decubitus, and extreme physical pain.

A need for free will that is confirmed in the extraordinary 20 minutes of dialogue between Bobby and an old priest of his acquaintance through which they manage to say to each other all that is necessary for both of them to say.

A sublime and heartbreaking finale confirms the project signed by the hand of a great artist.

Twelve guards will be killed by paramilitaries. nine political prisoners will starve to death along with Bobby Sands who will see death after 66 days of agony. The hypocrisy of the British government will make him a member of parliament and demands will be met.

The film seems at times untenable; it is likewise an operation of absolute aestheticism, subversive and disruptive.

With Steve McQueen we move without any difficulty from listening to images of bodies talking to dialogue that perfectly portrays what needs to be portrayed.

A great artist succeeds in making the viewer linger in front of what he represents, educates him to allow himself time to be moved and reflect in front of the nakedness of the human.

He guides him to process the shock, the shock caused by cruel, strong, violent, icy images that represent without qualms what cannot be kept silent, because art is in the service of a poignant project.

If the "purpose of art is not to reproduce the visible but to make it visible," as Paul Klee argued, this film is a convincing example.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice