Hunger [Matthew's Journal]

We've just been to see Hunger, the recent film about Bobby Sands' hunger strike. Given how many prizes this film has won, it's remarkably hard to track down! Warwick Arts Center did the honours, in a small cinema, with about a dozen people in the audience.

It's a strong film, which really doesn't pull its punches - in terms of the brutality of the prison regime, the damage that hunger striking does to Sands' body, or the violence in wider society. It's really quite unpleasant in places, and I'm a little surprised it is only certificate 15 as a result.

I'm not quite sure what I make of it, or of what Hunger was trying to say - the scene where Sands and his priest argue about the rights and wrongs of hunger striking to death is inconclusive. David Davies MP condemned the public fund that paid for some of the post-production work, on the basis that Hunger was "sympathetic to the IRA", and I have to wonder if he actually watched the film. I think Hunger reminds us (if the memories of 25 years ago have faded already) that the Troubles harmed people on both sides of Northern Ireland, and that there was good and evil on both sides too. The way Margaret Thatcher's broadcasts are heard at points in the action are apposite reminders of how remote she was to what was going on; I think Hunger wants to point to the humanity of the people concerned.

Worth seeing if you have the chance, but not if you're feeling at all fragile.

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I've had no intention of seeing it precisely because I've understood it gives a sympathetic portrayal of Sands and his fellow IRA criminals. Are you telling me it doesn't, I'm wrong, and that I should see it?

S.

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I've not seen it, but I have seen The wind that shakes the barley – about which similar complaints were made by self-righteous politicians – and found that a powerful if harrowing portrayal of the good and evil inherent in both sides (at an earlier stage of that conflict).

Such films give us a salutary reminder that there is nothing civil about a civil war. A man (even a criminal) does not lightly starve himself to death. Without being sympathetic to those who seek to advance their causes by violence, one might seek to understand the motives that could drive him to such desperate measures. So perhaps, Anonymous S, you should see it for yourself rather than shunning it on the strength of second-hand reports.

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I've no interest in seeing a film that has tries to make Sand's case for him - that has any sympathy for the idea that the IRA prisoners weren't simply common criminals, or that they should have received any special treatment.

If it's not such a film, someone has only to say. But if all I hear is that it is such a film, then I see no reason to subject myself to an apologetic for murderers and their sympathisers and I stand four-square behind Davies.

So. Is it sympathetic to Sands and his comrades? Or does it make plain that they were common criminals?

(This isn't a merely academic debate about a distant historical moment, either: there are currently plans afoot to turn part of the Maze site into some kind of sick shrine to the hunger strikers, as if they were martyrs who deserved some kind of memorial).

S.

They may have been common criminals; they weren't "simply" common criminals. Common criminals do not starve themselves to death. Their sympathisers might argue that Sands & Co were martyrs in a noble cause; others that they were deluded, misguided or coerced. I don't know whether the film presents that debate fairly. I do know that The wind that shakes was accused of a pro-IRA bias which I did not find in it; it came over as a powerful indictment of the horrors of civil conflict.

Right, you lose the right to be listened to.

S.

I don't think that right is solely in your gift. You have a right to your opinions and others have a right to theirs. I would give the opinion of someone who has seen a film more weight than that of somebody who hasn't, as to whether it presents real historical events accurately and fairly. You don't have to see it if you don't want to - particularly if you feel that to do so would be in some sense to condone murder and atrocity, though I'd question the logic of that. But the intransigence of closed minds (on both sides) was one of factors which so prolonged and escalated the conflicts with which these films (whatever their faults) are concerned.

Oh, and 'not being presumptuous enough to keep some kind of on-line diary' is not the same thing as 'anonymity', Anonymous J. Y. One-hundred.

S.

LJ displays the postings of the 'unpresumptuous' as Anonymous - mere convention.

Oh, yeah, and: what civil war?

S.

My remark was about any civil conflict - one which sets neighbours and sometimes brothers against each other. Apparently the one Sands & Co. were engaged in isn't ranked as a war by most authorities because not enough people were killed. Is a full-scale war fought by forces of sovereign states and supposedly according to the Geneva Convention any better?

I don't think it's unreasonable to shun a film on the strength of second hand opinions. The thing about films is that you tend to only watch them once, so it's rather difficult to decide whether to boycott a film based upon viewing it. Given this, one has to decide whether to watch a film based upon the opinions of others who have seen it. For example, lots of disability rights organisations have campaigned against the film Tropic Thunder due to its portrayal of people with intellectual disabilities. On the balance of things, I'd prefer not to pay to see a film which a lot of people feel promotes damaging impressions of certain people.

I didn't think it was sympathetic to Sands; I'm not sure you'd agree, though.

How did it compare with, say, The Baader-Meinhof Complex?

S.

I've not seen that.

Oddly, another friend has just blogged to say, "If anyone has not yet seen The Baader-Meinhof Complex, do find an independent cinema and go and watch it."

It does sound fantastic, and would interest me very much. Whether I'm likely to be feeling non-fragile enough while it's still on *and* be able to get to see it is another matter.

Matthew's Journal

Hunger

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October