1. Pausanos 1
Joshua Pausanos
Laura Long
TA 100W
10 May 2014
Steve McQueen: Visual Artist & Humanitarian
Feces stained prison cells, underground homosexual orgies, 19th century US slave trade.
These are the extreme environments that British filmmaker Steve McQueen exploits to bring the
audience closer to reality. The works of director Steve McQueen touch on slavery, racism,
equality, war, sex addiction, and more but what the video-artist accomplishes is accurately
depicting the genuine struggle that his characters face through imagery. While most filmmakers
chose to reveal why a protagonist behaves the way they do, Steve McQueen is primarily
concerned about what the protagonist does. From his first video short Bear (1993) to his latest
feature 12 Years a Slave (2013) Steve McQueen envelopes audiences by presenting as little
information as needed and instead relying heavily on the visual language by using techniques
such as long takes to accentuate the power of his actor’s performances within the frame. In this
paper I will examine the background of this prolific artist, as well as his artwork, short films, and
feature films in order to illustrate the impact he has in alternative cinema.
Decca Aitkenhead, a writer from The Guardian, interviewed Steve McQueen and
concluded that his films often depict “human survival in states of extremity” (Aitkenhead 2014).
Indeed we can see that in each of his feature films the protagonists struggle to live in desperate
situations. Hunger (2008) tells the story of a hunger striker in prison, Shame (2011) depicts the
life of a sex addict in New York, and 12 Years a Slave (2013) shows the struggle of a free man
sold into slavery. Just as his protagonists deal with dilemmas that revolve in extreme

2. Pausanos 2
environments, Steve McQueen too was brought up in a life full of strife. He was born in West
London in 1969 to his father who was a bricklayer and his mother who worked in a hospital,
both of Grenadian descent. McQueen lived in a working class society where he was able to
observe first hand how troubled the world was. Living in London during the 70s and early 80s,
McQueen experienced the racial tension that grew in the 1970s fueled by discrimination,
inequality, and poverty experienced by the African-Caribbean populations. When he was 12
years old the Brixton Riot in South London occurred in which police clashed with members of
the African-Caribbean community who were fed up by the economic problems in the area, which
were fueled by racial discrimination. Even at a younger age McQueen experienced racial
discrimination in school as he was placed in a lower level class because he was black and
dyslexic. His class was focused on manual labor while the two higher-level classes focused on
normal education and was meant “for kids who were going to go to Oxford and Cambridge”
(Weiner 2014) as he put it in one interview. Luckily, McQueen was able to escape this extreme
way of life through art. He first started with drawings as a kid that often exhibited movement,
whether it were “cars, dashes in the middle of the street, birds.” (Weiner 2014). Eventually his
artwork evolved after attending art schools such as Hammersmith and West London College,
Chelsea College of Art and Design and Goldsmiths College, University of London. It was at
Chelsea College that he picked up an 8mm camera and started documenting random portions of
his life, like walking around London. Finally, after attending NYU’s Tisch School of filmmaking
for a short while, McQueen settled back in Britain where he began to make experimental short
films. Looking back at his early life, we can see how his real life struggle in the discriminated
working class society and love for the visual medium helped him gain clarity for his filmmaking
career.

3. Pausanos 3
The clarity of vision Steve McQueen has can be seen through his earliest works,
especially from his videos Bear (1993), Western Deep (2002), and Gravesend (2007). In each of
these video-art installations, McQueen shows us how effective the basic elements of light and
dark, stillness and motion, and sound and silence can move the audience. His first short Bear
(1993) is a silent film that features two black men wrestling each other in the nude. The short
was originally an installation piece in Tate Modern in London and was shown in a large black
room with black polished floors in order to completely envelope the viewer. As we can see here
and in the rest of his career, McQueen’s pieces rely on the sensory and visual experience felt by
the audience in order to convey a certain the feeling or mood. We can also see the foreshadowing
in McQueen’s interest in sexuality, violence, body movement and ambiguity in his first video
short. Later in his life, he moved to more of a documentary art platform with his work on
Western Deep, which depicted the harsh life of South African gold miners. The piece is roughly
25 minutes long and is a mix of documentary footage in the gold mine, darkness, silence, and
few sounds. It begins in darkness with the sound of an elevator moving into the deep unknown.
After we arrive at the bottom of the gold mine the short is cut into a montage of sorts showing
miners working and b-roll of the mine in silence. Suddenly we’re taken to a scene of South
African workers being taken through an exercise by white supervisors in which they are
instructed in step exercises while a blaring red alarm flashes on the side of a wall. The sound
here blares in the ears of the viewer. It’s in this short that we can observe McQueen honing his
skills of the cinematic language. In an article published by The MIT Press, writer T.J. Demos
expresses that Steve McQueen uses,
The exaggerated effects…to create for the viewer a somatic encounter, one
defined by intensified colors and streaks of light, by the gorgeous darkness in

4. Pausanos 4
which so much of the film is cast, and by its powerful and unpredictable
soundtrack, which both impacts the body with physical force and allows one to
experience one's own physiological presence before the image. (Demos 2005)
Just as Demos describes, McQueen creates an environment for the viewer that reflects the
environment that is being displayed. In this case, the darkness, discrimination and
disillusionment of working in the gold mine is portrayed through the darkness of the film and the
editing choices McQueen used. The innovation of this short is McQueen’s attempt to bring the
audience and the image together to exploit the real-world problem of racial and work-related
atrocities at the TauTona gold mine in South African. McQueen’s command and restraint of
visual storytelling sharpens in his quasi-documentary short Gravesend (2007) wherein he
exposes the problems of globalization through the senses. In the short video we trace the origins
of the precious metal coltan from the labs where it is processed for electronic materials, to depths
of Congo where it is mined and smuggled by involuntary Congolese people. The opening starts
off with slick and machine-like camera work documenting the coltan processing labs in the UK
but then the audio and image begins to fade into an image of black workers mining the earth in
Congo. While the figures and movement in the lab are definite, the imagery of the Congolese
people working is much more abstract; we cannot make out distinct features on the workers faces
but rather just their body movements. Writer T.J. Demos analyzes McQueen’s visual strategy in
his article “Moving Images of Globalization” by explaining that,
Gravesend portrays its miners as ghostly absences of light, as voids in the visual
field…[in order to mirror] the zone of non-representation that is the
disenfranchised status of Congolese laborers [and] show those people to be

5. Pausanos 5
undetermined and thus sites where the unknowable and the potential coincide.
(Demos 2009)
Just as Demos explains, McQueen uses visuals to expose the unseen effects of globalization, but
its not as if he is pushing a political agenda onto his audience. By refraining from revealing the
laborers faces and risking the audience feeling solely sympathetic to their political situation,
McQueen displays the ambiguity of their lives in order to draw the audience to the potential of
their situation. Demo’s reaffirms this argument, clarifying that “Gravesend’s gambit is to draw
out the very ambiguity of being so that life’s separation from politics cannot disclose a simple
ontological truth but rather must be viewed as a political effect.” (Demos 2009) Instead of
providing the audience with a definite emotion, McQueen delivers a visual experience that the
audience can examine and observe for their own judgment. It is with this command and control
of visual storytelling that Steve McQueen embarked on his first feature film, Hunger (2008).
In 1981, when McQueen was only eleven years old, the Irish Republican Army (IRA)
held a hunger strike in the British prison Long Kesh, otherwise known as “H-blocks”, outside of
Belfast in Northern Ireland. The strike was held in protest against the political status of IRA
inmates being imprisoned for various crimes during “The Troubles”, an on-going social and
political conflict during Northern Ireland’s change in constitutional status. The hunger strike was
led by provisional IRA member Bobby Sands, who had experienced the severe conditions at the
H-blocks first hand. The eventual death of Sands is what inspired Steve McQueen to make his
first feature film. Although the real story of Sands and the H-blocks are political, McQueen has
said, “I don't think Hunger is a political film, it's a human film.” (Crowdus 2009) In fact,
McQueen made sure to make a nonpartisan movie by focusing not only on the inmates
experience at H-blocks but also the human experiences of a prison guard, and a young

6. Pausanos 6
policeman. Once again the filmmaker uses his strong visual language in order to convey the
humanity in every person. For example, the movie opens with a seemingly normal man going
through his regular morning work routine. It isn’t until we see a shot of his bloodied hands that
we realize he is a prison guard, who is doing what he is instructed. McQueen shows the man
having a cigarette alone as the snow falls; he has just beaten up several IRA prisoners. In this
long take there is a very slow movement to this man as we see him thinking about his actions.
All we hear is the sound of the snow falling, just as he would. Then we get a close up of the
snow falling on his wounds. Here McQueen gives us all we need to get inside the guard’s head
and feel the same guilt he does. In another instance of human emotion, McQueen places a large
group of tough policemen in riot gear who are creating a drumbeat with their batons in
anticipation of a rough cavity search. We focus on a young man in riot gear who looks nervous
and as the inmates are beaten into submission for the searches we cut to a shot of this young
policeman crying outside of the prison walls. The director gives the audience another instance in
which true human emotion is revealed. As McQueen says, “I felt that we needed to have this
scene of him crying, after having kicked and beaten another person, in order to show these
people as human beings, not as freaks.” (Crowdus 2009) Finally, in one of the most visually
poetic scenes in cinema, as Bobby Sand’s is dying on his deathbed after refusing to eat, his
delusionary state causes him to hallucinate and drift into childhood memories. This memory of
him as a teenager on a cross-country trip with friends, exploring the woods, chasing animals and
birds is embodied through a floating camera around Sand’s deathbed. The audience floats around
the room with the sounds of birds flapping and kids playing as Bobby Sand’s convulses is
tragically beautiful. Suddenly we hear Bobby take his last breath and the camera sits stationary
next to his side for an extended period of time, unflinching. It’s in this scene that McQueen

7. Pausanos 7
shows us the divergence in human nature. Sand’s had been battling an up hill political battle that
had consumed his life and on his death bed he could only take himself back to the days of
freedom, to the days when he was carefree. Through Sand’s fleeting memory of childhood,
McQueen shows us that we all share the same human qualities, no matter a political conflict or
social conflict; we all experience the same kind of struggles. In his first feature, McQueen is able
to take on a highly political topic and strip down the story to certain elements in order to show us
how humanity operates.
In his second film Shame (2011), Steve McQueen takes on a more minimalist plot to
speak volumes about a problem that not many people recognize: sex addiction. Shame follows
the life of Brandon, a wealthy, young businessman who spends his days and nights indulging in
sex and pornographic material. When his problematic sister, Sissy, arrives his life no longer has
the control he desires. What McQueen does in this film is reveal to us the loneliness and
excessive control of Brandon’s sexual appetite and how it affects his intimate relationships. For
example, Brandon tries to have an intimate relationship with a coworker but when they get
physically intimate Brandon’s body does not respond. Not only until after he pays for a prostitute
does his body react. In this instance, McQueen shows us how Brandon’s control over his sexual
encounters affects his intimacy. McQueen makes this fact more apparent to the audience by once
again using camera and sound to manipulate the feelings felt by Brandon. In a certain scene
where Brandon and a friend watch his sister perform a melancholy version of the song “New
York, New York” the camera stays on a close up of Sissy as she sings her song. The sadness in
her voice is all we can hear and we can tell she is singing to her brother. McQueen then gives us
a shot of Brandon who is sitting unblinking as a tear drops down the side of his face. In this
moment McQueen shows us the struggle of Brandon to find intimacy. As McQueen puts it,

8. Pausanos 8
You see the situation with Brandon in the nightclub and Sissy's singing 'New
York, New York' to him, and he's heartbroken. He's forced to sit down and listen.
She's performing and she can directly tell him how she feels. And she's telling
him where they've come from, and where they would like to go. So in that huge
room, with so many people, they have an intimacy, which is absolutely amazing,
where he actually opens up. This is not a monster, this is not a person who is
sexist. This is a person who has a problem and in the film we look at that
problem. (James 2012)
So, by using a long take, McQueen centers the audience in on the central problem that Brandon
has, the lack of real intimacy. In his second feature, McQueen hones his technique to explore a
well looked over problem in America, not in a political way but more so in a human way.
As we can tell, Steve McQueen’s foundation in video art set him up well for cinema.
Through his experimentation in his earlier works he gained the mastery giving viewers visual
experiences through sensory imagery and sound. Towards his later work in video art, he obtained
the culture and world-view that would later affect his storytelling techniques for feature films
like Hunger. McQueen’s overall mission is to affect audiences with his films in order to spark
conversation. His work never commits the audience to a certain social or political ideas but
rather it allows the audience to think about what they’ve seen so that they can formulate their
own judgment. Steve McQueen is highly influential in alternative filmmaking for this reason and
because he cares for humanity and wants to invigorate people through his art.

9. Pausanos 9
Works Cited
Aitkenhead, D. (2014, January 4). Steve McQueen: my hidden shame. The Guardian. Retrieved
May 12, 2014, from http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/04/steve-mcqueen-my-
painful-childhood-shame
Crowdus, G. The Human Body as a Political Weapon: An Interview with Steve McQueen.
Cineaste, 34, 22-25. Retrieved May 5, 2014, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41690759 .
Demos, T. J. (2009). Moving Images of Globalization. Grey Room, (37), 6-29.
Demos, T.J.(2005). The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen. October, Vol. 114, (Autumn,
2005), pp. 61-89. Published by: The MIT Press. Article Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/stable/3397625
Evans, D. War Artist: Steve McQueen and Postproduction Art. Afterimage , 35, 17-20. Retrieved
May 5, 2014, from
http://search.proquest.com.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/docview/212135396?accountid=10361
James, N. Sex and the City. Sight and Sound, 22, 34, 36, 38. Retrieved May 4, 2014, from
http://search.proquest.com.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/docview/920320810?accountid=10361

10. Pausanos 10
Marsh, C. (2013, October 18). The Early Work of Steve McQueen. Film.com. Retrieved May 6,
2014, from http://www.film.com/movies/the-early-work-of-steve-mcqueen-12-years-a-
slave
Weiner, J. (2014, March 3). The Liberation of Steve McQueen. . Retrieved May 6, 2014, from
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/the-liberation-of-steve-mcqueen-
20140303?page=2