Observations on Film Art No. 40

In his stunning feature debut, Steve McQueen (SMALL AXE, 12 YEARS A SLAVE) used minimal dialogue and vivid imagery to tell the harrowing true story of Irish Republican Army member and political prisoner Bobby Sands’s hunger strike against the British state. In this edition of Observations on Film Art, Professor Kristin Thompson explores how McQueen’s background as a sculptor and installation artist informed his uniquely tactile approach to storytelling and how he uses an accumulation of seemingly small, often elusive visual details—a fly, a snowflake, a brush, an ashtray, a feather—to create a visceral experience that “speaks” more fully through its images than it does through words.