The actor paid a high price for this, the process of a living body dying on a hunger strike, and recorded the details: muscle atrophy, blood in the stool, festering, syncope... and the manifestation of death in one eye. During his hunger strike, he was so thin that he could not stand, which was terrible.
In Hunger, McCorquay repeatedly demonstrates the basic action of "cleaning" with extraordinary patience: prison officers clean the blood from their fists; clean the feces on the walls; A long shot, which can be compared to a long shot of playing with flies by a barred window and talking to a priest); cleaning the traces of the festering bodies of the hunger strikers on the sheets... The key to the struggle for cleaning and anti-cleaning is this: the rebels must put themselves The blood, feces, urine, etc. produced by the body remain visible, refuse to let them disappear into the hole of the bathtub like Jenny's blood, refuse to be in the perverse place of prison (used by the strong in political struggle to imprison the weak) place) to restore apparent normality; so does the struggle to remain naked in a prison uniform—rejecting one’s body from being imposed on the identity represented by the prison uniform becomes part of the normal order of the prison.
The power of this hunger strike lies not so much in directly evoking the sympathy of others, but in that it makes a kind of heterogeneous death stand out in the public sphere, an anomalous event that anyone has to face and think about, and thus powerfully Destroyed the false leveling and unity of ideology. The weakest body thus becomes the most aggressive and powerful body.
The film begins with equally patient details of a prison officer's daily routine: getting up, getting dressed, having breakfast, checking for car bombs (putting this in the routine, ironically), driving to work, picking off a wedding ring , changing his uniform... Of course, the more he relied on the routines of daily life, on the ideology of the ruler, the less he thought about the violence, and the more violence became a part of his life.
This is the reality for some people, and it is the normal-hard reality that others hope to break. McCoy showed a degree of sympathy by having the prison officer shot in the arms of his demented mother.
McCoy "resurrected" Sands with images more than 20 years later, of course not to repeat the grand meanings that people already know, but to patiently retain through the images those that are usually not in the political struggle (and its grand discourse). The things and details that left their mark, what he did were as politically important as the anti-purging struggle in prison.
Not just Sands, but McCoy's seemingly dispassionate images are "starved." "Hunger" comes not just from the hunger striker's stomach, but from the dissatisfaction of all radical revolutionaries with the fact that the existing order is always trying to erase some of the heterogenous and residual violent nature, from the hunger for justice.
View more about Hunger reviews
