J. Hoberman's Favorite Films of 2009 (Village Voice)

The decade closes with a flashback to the medium's once-vaunted universal appeal, although The Hurt Locker's impressive consensus popularity comes more from critics than audiences. Sign of the times: The Hurt Locker is one of five war or war-related movies on my list, although the pair at the bottom are more like war fantasies. Those two movie-movies and the 3-D spectacular Coraline aside, the films that most impressed me this year have mainly been modest productions, self-contained and sharply focused—and in that, The Hurt Locker is exemplary as well.

1. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)

2. Hunger (Steve McQueen)

British video artist Steve McQueen's first feature is as visceral as it is formalist. Based on the jailhouse passion of Irish Republican martyr Bobby Sands, Hunger is an extreme drama, replete with suffering and pain, a reasoned political essay, and a cinematic icon with an awe-inspiring final movement that, informed by a thousand years of religious art, is something to experience even more than watch.

3. Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu)

A young detective in Romanian backwater places a trio of pot-smoking teenagers under surveillance, files reports, and deems the crime too minor to warrant prosecution—but who is he to judge? Staged for maximum objectivity, Corneliu Porumboiu's accomplished second feature has something of Jim Jarmusch's deadpan theatricality. But it's also a deadly serious, often brilliant analysis of bureaucratic procedure and the tyranny of language.

4. I'm Gonna Explode (Gerardo Naranjo)

Gerardo Naranjo proves the French new wave ever-young with this audacious transposition of Jean-Luc Godard's ultra-romantic Pierrot le fou (más o menos) to a Mexican high school. I'm Gonna Explode derives its essential pathos less by fetishizing Pierrot than by embracing that film's profoundly adolescent nature—Godard isn't pastiched or travestied, but poignantly downsized.

5. Coraline (Henry Selick)

The most obsessive movie of 2009, Henry Selick's fantastically labor-intensive fantasy is also the year's strongest adaption of a children's book and finest animated film, puppet or otherwise. For all its near-psychotic content, it's the most subtly calibrated 3-D movie made in Hollywood since Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder. In fact, if you haven't seen it in 3-D, you haven't seen it.

6. The Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov)

After portraying Hitler and Lenin, Aleksandr Sokurov concludes his 20th-century dictator cycle on an upbeat note, with a ruler who declines divinity—Hirohito of Japan. Set mainly in the emperor's makeshift bunker, The Sun is characteristically precise and almost droll, with Issei Ogata notable for his humanizing—and, in Japan, taboo-breaking—performance.

7. The Beaches of Agnès (Agnès Varda)

Now an octogenarian, Agnès Varda—the great idiosyncratic original of the French nouvelle vague—plays herself in this charming memoir, gleaning material from her films and photographs. Varda's playful psychodrama is fanciful but frugal, fey yet tough, as it explicates and enriches an entire oeuvre.

8. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)

Argentine writer-director Lucrecia Martel is one of the world's most inventive narrative filmmakers precisely because she is so stubbornly disinclined to spell out a narrative—her stories coalesce out of overheard dialogue, shifts in focus, and off-handed shock cuts. Martel's third feature is a dark comedy of disassociation in which the audience is compelled to share the opaque protagonist's mental state and, like her, live in the moment.

9. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)

Yo, Q! IG is energetic, funny, blithely fantastic, and blatantly stoopid—or do I mean fuckin' awesome? It's also amoral and a bit obnoxious, but I'll take Tarantino's essentially generous "Jewish porn" (as one participant crassly put it) any day over the mean-spirited "Nazi porn" (yes) of A Serious Man.

10. Red Cliff (John Woo)

The prodigal son returns . . . almost. Based on a 14th-century Chinese novel, John Woo's spectacular homecoming arrived here relatively unheralded and chopped to half its five-hour running time. Perhaps one of our local film festivals will see fit to present what looks like Woo's magnum opus in its complete version.

11. The Girlfriend Experience (Steven Soderbergh, U.S.) and, tied for 12th, 11 more honorable mentions: Antichrist (Lars von Trier, Denmark), Afterschool (Antonio Campos, U.S.), The Baader Meinhof Complex (Uli Edel, Germany), Brüno (Larry Charles, U.S.), Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, U.S.), The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch, U.S.), Me and Orson Welles (Richard Linklater, U.S.), Tony Manero (Pablo Larrain, Chile), Tulpan (Sergei Dvortsevoy, Russia), 24 City (Jia Zhangke, China), and The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, Austria).

History Through an Unblinking Lens (The New York Times)

By DENNIS LIM

“HUNGER,” the first feature film by the British artist Steve McQueen, recounts the final weeks of Bobby Sands, the imprisoned Irish nationalist who died in 1981, 66 days into a hunger strike. But the movie, which does not examine the arc of Sands’s life or the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, is far from a conventional docudrama or issue movie. Instead it is something starker and more precise, with a single-mindedness to match that of its subject, a man who decides to starve himself to death.

Recreating the brutal conditions in which that decision was made and the harrowing physical decline that followed, “Hunger” is a visceral film with a philosophical bent, a meditation on will and endurance, on the human body as the ultimate site of protest.

“It’s the whole idea of the body as a weapon,” Mr. McQueen said. “If that’s all you have, how do you use it?”

“Hunger,” which opens in New York on March 20, won the Camera d’Or, the prize for best first feature, at the Cannes Film Festival last May. But Mr. McQueen, 39, is hardly a newcomer to filmmaking, even though his films and videos have until now been shown in galleries and not theaters. A star of the art world, he won the prestigious Turner Prize in 1999 and is representing Britain at this year’s Venice Biennale.

With “Hunger,” set almost entirely within the notorious Maze Prison near Belfast, Mr. McQueen wanted to make a film about “an extraordinary world that has become ordinary,” he said. It unfolds in three distinct movements, each with its own style.

The first section evokes the sickening atmosphere in the maximum-security H-blocks (so named because of their shape) during the so-called dirty protests, when members of the Irish Republican Army who were demanding recognition as political prisoners took to pouring urine under cell doors and smearing excrement on the walls.

The second act, making up for the near wordlessness of the first, is all talk, capturing an intimate conversation about the morality of suicide between Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a priest (Liam Cunningham), much of it presented in a single, static 17-minute take. In the final third silence takes over again as Sands begins his hunger strike, his body wasting away and his mind increasingly prone to hallucinations. Mr. Fassbender appears naked in these scenes — Sands refused to wear a prison uniform — and lost about 40 pounds during filming, under medical supervision.

The contemporary significance of “Hunger” — an unflinching depiction of prison brutality, complete with ritual beatings and humiliations — is not lost on Mr. McQueen. “It happened 27 years ago,” he said, speaking last fall while in town for the New York Film Festival. “But it has just as much relevance to what was happening with Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.”

He was quick to add, though, that he started thinking about “Hunger” in 2003. The film’s preoccupations ultimately seem less political than existential. Mr. McQueen sidesteps the customary views of Sands as a martyr and a terrorist and regards him above all as an enigma.

The initial spark was a powerful memory of encountering news reports of the hunger strike on television as an 11-year-old, before he grasped its political meaning. “It made a big impression on me,” he said. “Behind the newsreader would be a photograph of a guy with a number beneath his name, and every day that number went up.”

Very little visual documentation exists of life in the H-blocks; Mr. McQueen found about 90 seconds of footage shot by a news crew. But he was determined to create a film so vivid in its details that it would register almost as a sense memory, an experience that would seem to “bring everything back” for viewers who had never set foot in a jail cell or heard of the hunger strike.

One strategy was to bring a tactile intensity to the imagery. “If you see a drop of rain on someone’s knuckle, you feel it because you know that physical sensation,” he said. “That sensory experience brings you closer to an emotional one.”

Mr. McQueen immersed himself in research, reading news accounts and books like David Beresford’s “Ten Men Dead.” (Sands was the first of 10 hunger strikers who perished.) Most useful of all was the week he and his screenwriter, the Irish playwright Enda Walsh, spent interviewing former I.R.A. inmates and prison officers.

“Usually people ask them the big questions,” Mr. McQueen said. “But I was more interested in the details you couldn’t find in the books. Like what’s it like waking up with maggots all over your body? What’s it like with all these bluebottles dancing around your cell? At what point do you get used to all the feces on the wall?”

With its you-are-there immediacy “Hunger” makes no bones about ignoring the bigger political picture. Margaret Thatcher is purely a disembodied nemesis, heard but never seen as she repudiates the prisoners’ demands. “She had to come in as vapor,” Mr. McQueen said. “I didn’t want to leave the H-block.”

He had envisioned a film that spoke almost exclusively without words. “When there’s too much talking in a movie, it sort of ruins your brain,” he said. But he came to realize the importance of not just hearing Sands explain his position but also having it tested by a worthy opponent. Mr. McQueen likened the face-off between Bobby and the priest to “Connors versus McEnroe at the Wimbledon final, two people wanting the same thing but wanting it differently.”

The sights and sounds in “Hunger” have the effect of concentrating the senses, a hallmark of Mr. McQueen’s work. The long, unblinking conversation harks back to his 2001 installation “7th November,” in which a man talks at length about the death of his brother over a single projected image of a scarred cranium.

The focus on the body can be traced to many of his shorts, from “Bear” (1993), which showed two men wrestling (one of them Mr. McQueen), to “Charlotte” (2004), in which Mr. McQueen’s fingers prod and pinch the wrinkled eyelid of the actress Charlotte Rampling.

Mr. McQueen, who has a likably gruff manner, is less than thrilled when people look for traces of the visual artist in “Hunger.” “It’s rubbish,” he said. “Are my camera sweeps a bit more dandylike? I could be a butcher making a movie.”

His gallery pieces, it’s worth noting, are more cinematic than what is commonly considered video art, and often even steeped in film history. (His best-known work, 1997’s “Deadpan,” in which he stands in front of a collapsing house frame, is a riff on Buster Keaton’s “Steamboat Bill.”)

“I think first and foremost Steve has always been a filmmaker, not a video artist,” said Okwui Enwezor, a curator who has included Mr. McQueen’s work in the international contemporary art show Documenta. “ ‘Hunger’ does not depart from the intensity of Steve’s early work. It has distilled it, made it more taut and frighteningly poetic and devastating in equal measure.”

Mr. McQueen said: “The beautiful thing about film — it sounds so obvious and corny, but everyone could tell you a story. Not everyone knows contemporary art.”

“Hunger” is not his only recent attempt to reach a wider public. Appointed war artist by the Imperial War Museum in London, Mr. McQueen, who lives in Amsterdam, traveled to Iraq expecting to make a video. Instead he proposed a piece, called “Of Queen and Country,” that would take the form of official postage stamps featuring photographs of the war dead. (He produced a run for an exhibition, but the British postal service has declined to collaborate.) “It’s not pro-war,” he said of the project. “And it’s not antiwar.”

More than most artists, it seems, Mr. McQueen is reluctant to let his work be diminished by interpretation and analysis. It is hard to miss the overtones of Christian art and iconography in “Hunger,” especially in the Passion-like final act, but Mr. McQueen, without exactly disavowing the religious associations, shrugs them off.

“It’s a naked skinny guy dying — sort of unavoidable,” he said. “People mythologize it because that’s easier to digest.”

And to make “Hunger” a remotely easy film would have been a betrayal of the facts. “However you look at it, it’s a brutal act,” he said. “It takes a long time to die that way. Is there a worse way to die than starving yourself? I don’t know.”

"La mujer sin cabeza", en el Top Ten 2008 de Sight & Sound

Cincuenta críticos eligieron sus cinco películas favoritas de 2008 en una encuesta de la revista Sight & Sound que será publicada en la edición de enero. Este Top Ten es un adelanto de los resultados, que incluye una notable performance del filme argentino "La mujer sin cabeza", de Lucrecia Martel. La ganadora, previsiblemente, es la película inglesa "Hunger".

1. Hunger (Steve McQueen, UK)
2. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA)
3. WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, USA)
4. Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, Italy)
5. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France)
5. The Class (Laurent Cantet, France)
7. Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, UK)
8. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)
9. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/France/Italy/Spain)
9. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden).

Diario de Tallin - Parte 4

Luego de unos días de ausencia --tal vez causados por el estupor provocado por el vodka finlandés-- reaparece nuestro intrépido cronista en Estonia, esta vez para dedicarnos una apasionada pieza de defensa de la película "Hunger", de Steve McQueen.


Por Eduardo Flores Lescano

Ayer fue un buen día, pero han pasado tantas cosas en los últimos dos que no he podido hilvanarlas correctamente. Las noches son muy largas, la gente es mucha, en fin, vida de festival. Pero ayer viví quizás una de las experiencias cinematográficas más intensas del año. Me enfrenté a "Hunger". Quizás la película más importante, más potente, hasta ahora, de este festival.

Su director se llama Steve McQueen, no confundir con el de "Papillon": no es él. Posible ganadora de la competencia oficial del Black Nights Film Fest, me dejó convencido de que hay un cine que puede prescindir de pretensiones estúpidas, y de que hay un cine realmente ingenuo del que este filme no forma parte. Logra apoyarse en la potencia musical de los sonidos de la vida cotidiana y generar una tensión poética y visual cuyos límites se expanden de manera brutal.

"Hunger" es un film brutal, basado en la famosa huelga de hambre que en el año 1981 llevó a Bobby Sands y a nueve hombres más a la muerte en una cárcel para presos politicos del IRA, en el norte de Irlanda. El film comienza con la presentación de la forma de vida en la cárcel, la convivencia entre los golpes, las vejaciones, la relación entre el cuerpo desnudo de los presos y los palos de los guardias, en escenas realmente difíciles de olvidar. Luego, el peso de la pelicula, que estaba soportado en uno de los guardiacárceles y su estrecha conexión con la violencia y el intento por "domesticar" a los presos, recae sobre los hombros de la decisión de Bobby Sands de llevar a cabo una huelga de hambre hasta la muerte, y si muere, ser reemplazado por un compañero, y así hasta lograr su objetivo, status político e independencia religiosa.

Luego de una escena que dura más de diez minutos, un plano fijo, en el que Bobby Sands le comunica a un cura lo que va a hacer, para que lo informe afuera, la película se convierte en un calvario que obliga a veces a cerrar los ojos. Se está frente al cine del futuro, y McQueen, quiéralo o no, logró hacer una pelicula perfecta. No hay un plano que sobre y no hay palabras dichas de más. McQueen se anima a todo, alejado de cualquier cliché de cine carcelario, usa tomas fijas y largas, travellings, primeros planos, cámara en mano, sobre todo en las escenas de las golpizas, cuyo crescendo asusta, porque el espectador ve que eso realmente está pasando, que los cuerpos están recibiendo los golpes, que se deterioran a medida que la pelicula avanza, aunque sea una construcción artística, ficcional. La película respira, vomita, escupe, sangra, es demasiado real.

Pero quizás lo más importante desde el punto de vista formal sea el uso de los sonidos, pues la película no tiene música extradiegética, todo pertenece a la realidad de esa cárcel, a la realidad del momento, al palazo, a la piña encajada en medio de la cara, a las botas de los guardias corriendo por los pasillos, al ruido de la orina mezclada con lavandina en el pasillo, moviéndose como un río que transporta la dignidad de los soldados del IRA. Ojalá el BAFICI la proyecte: "Hunger" es una pelicula imprescindible, es la dignidad convertida en planos. Es, de ahora en mas, para mí, una necesidad, una espina clavada que no deja de penetrar la carne.