Hunger is the first feature film by Turner Prize winning British Video artist Steve McQueen. It took the Caméra d’Or prize at Cannes, honoring outstanding work by a first time director. The film is gut-wrenching, but not without tact. Political themes are deeply explored, but Hunger avoids being overly preachy. The film follows the true story of the last six weeks in the life of inmate Bobby Sands, a hunger striker and member of the IRA. Because it’s based on actual historical events, it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that the film does not have a happy ending.

The structure is somewhat atypical. The film opens by following a prison guard through his daily routine, which includes powerful, slow shots of him dipping his bloody knuckles in water after beating inmates. Pensive, nearly silent scenes gradually add together to give the viewer a chilling picture of the facility and the abuses occurring there.

The camera then begins to watch the travails of a new inmate upon his arrival. He is stripped naked, refusing to don a prison uniform as part of a protest to be recognized as a political prisoner. The film continues with wordless long takes. Two prisoners in a tiny cell, walls smeared with human waste. Cleverly discreet exchanges of contraband during family visits. Body cavity searches. Brutal beatings.

More after the jump.

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I have no idea what to do with Josh Fox’s Memorial Day, a sporadically engaging––but far too simple-minded to be as troubling as it wants to be––hypothetical slice-of-life which exists to explain away Abu Ghraib via spring break. It seems to be consensus that this is, at the very least, the ballsiest film at this festival, although it certainly has fewer defenders than detractors. I found it to be alternately mesmerizing, infuriating, boring and eye-rollingly facile. I think it fails as a narrative film, even as it occasionally stuns as a work of pure cinema. And yet, I don’t think it’s dismissable outright.

Executive produced by Michael Stipe, Memorial is the brainchild of a New York theater rabblerouser named Josh Fox, and is loosely based on his “traveling, site-specific theatre event” Death of Nations 1: The Comfort and Safety Of Your Own Home. Dressed in all in black with standard-issue hipster-lectual glasses, Fox rocked a frustrating evasiveness at the Q & A following the film’s CineVegas premiere; when asked to unpack his intentions, Fox responded, “I don’t really do that.” He did admit to being a tourist to the world his film depicts. “I’m from New York,” the first-time filmmaker said more than once, ultimately invoking an old Spaulding Gray line about living “off the coast of America.”

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The night before Sony Pictures Classics planned to open Errol Morris’ Abu Ghraib doc Standard Operating Procedure in two theaters the Tribeca Film Festival hosted a screening of the film, followed by a conversation between Morris and Jarhead author Anthony Swofford.

Beat to the festival circuit by over a year by Rory Kennedy’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (which debuted at Sundance 2007 and later screened on HBO), Morris’ two-hour dissection of the Iraqi prison schedule retreads a fair bit of ground that will be familiar to anyone who has followed the scandal closely and/or seen the previous film. But where Kennedy was primarily concerned with depicting the psychological climate that led to the abuses (of both detainees and power) and their photographic documentation, Morris is more concerned with revealing the discrepancy between what those iconic photographs seem to be documenting, and what the testimony of the indicted soldiers suggests is closer to the truth. “We looked at the photographs and thought we knew everything about Abu Ghraib,” Morris said after the screening. “We knew nothing.” …Read more

On today’s edition of FilmCouch, Paul and Kevin referenced Errol Morris in their discussion of Charles Ferguson’s even-tempered (yet incendiary) documentary, No End in Sight. So I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you to the most recent post on Zoom, Morris’ New York Times blog, which he filed this past Wednesday. Perhaps this is where it should be noted that although technically, Zoom is published in blog format, Morris is really using it as a platform to release long, critical essays on photography about once a month.

The August installment is about the infamous image of the hooded figure standing on a box at Abu Ghraib. Morris has done much research and rumination on this subject, as his next film, S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure, uses issues surrounding representation and photographic evidence as jumping off points to examine the events at Abu Ghraib within the larger context of the war on terror.

In this latest post on Zoom, Morris discusses a bizarre case of mistaken identity associated with that photograph. One Iraqi prisoner, who was given the nickname Clawman, told the NY Times that it was him under the hood; he even, according to Morris, “printed business cards with a drawing of the hooded-man displayed next to his name.” Later, it was discovered that Clawman was not actually the man in the photograph–the soldier in charge of watching him said that Clawman was never placed on a box, and in fact was a large enough man that “If Clawman had been put on a box, he would have crushed it” — and the NY Times published a retraction.

Morris explains that one of the reasons why Clawman’s story was able to fly was because the Times ran a photo with their story in which Clawman’s own, slightly deformed left hand was cropped out of frame. The actual photo of the man in hood is blurry and his fingers appear to be curled in. If you saw it juxtaposed with language professing it to be a photograph of a man with a deformed hand, you’d that claim accept at face value. As Morris puts it,

Photography presents things and at the same time hides things from our view. It allows us to not-see at the same time that it allows us to see. But language plus photography provides an express train to error.

The photograph should be a constant reminder of how we can make false inferences from pictures. And of how pictures and language can interact to produce falsehood.

The problem was not a lack of research. Yes, there was archival material that could have cast suspicion on the claim that Clawman was the Hooded Man. But the mistaken identification was driven by Clawman’s own desire to be the iconic victim, to be the Hooded Man, and our own need to believe him. It is an error engendered by photography and perpetuated by us. And it comes from a desire for “the ocular proof.” A proof that turns out to be no proof at all.

You can read the full story here. At the end, Morris thanks readers for their feedback and says he “intends to respond”, so if you have a question for the man you may want to leave it in the Zoom comments.

Several blurbs of note to report in the documentary world this late Thursday:

***Anthony Kaufman has the news that Errol Morris is blogging for the New York Times. Kaufman interprets Morris’ first entry–a long consideration of photography, truth, interpretation and meaning–as “a sneak peak into what I expect are the theoretical underpinnings” of Morris’ upcoming Abu Ghraib doc, Standard Operating Procedure.

***This is not a TV blog, so we won’t waste time making obscene hand gestures about most of the Emmy nominations. However, it’s worth noting that Spike Lee’s Hurricane Katrina doc When the Levees Broke picked up several nods, as did two recent festival hits: Rory Kennedy’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, and Stanley Nelson’s Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People’s Temple. A.J. Schnack has further details.

***John Anderson has a review of Your Mommy Kills Animals, a doc on the animal protection debate which begins a one-week Oscar qualifying run today. Calling it “a miraculously evenhanded treatment of a snarlingly divisive debate,” Anderson also notes that the film also makes “it pretty clear that blinkered self-righteousness and unwavering belief in one’s cause don’t much differ, whether you’re a member of the Animal Liberation Front or Al Qaeda. The corollary question is whether anything less than the most militant action will move corporations away from committing cruelty to animals.”