A colander hits the floor in Steve McQueen’s Mangrove, the first part of his Small Axe project. The colander, along with many other utensils, has fallen from its place in the kitchen of The Mangrove, a Caribbean restaurant in Notting Hill, following one of many police raids to occur on the premises, starting in the late 1960s into the 70s and beyond. As the owner, Frank Crichlow, is pinned down and racially abused by an officer, McQueen cuts to a low angle from the kitchen floor as several officers charge out of the restaurant, while the colander ceaselessly rocks back and forth on its side. When McQueen finally cuts away, after around 35 seconds, the colander is still in motion. A community holding firm against violence, and the violence that continues long after the commotion has ended.
McQueen fills Small Axe with these kinds of declaratory, summarising images. Lovers Rock is centred around an uninterrupted but necessarily private a cappella rendition of Janet Kay’s Silly Games at a house party. A flock of starlings twists and turns its way back and forth across the sky above an industrial estate in Red, White & Blue, an image of coordinated movement stemming from thousands of years of evolution that hits particularly hard in this study of a black police officer fighting against the deep-rooted prejudices ingrained within the Metropolitan Police. In Alex Wheatle, a young Black schoolboy is straightjacketed, racially abused, and thrown to the floor of an empty school hall by two White teachers after a classmate goads him with monkey chants, and in Education, a young boy, abandoned by his teachers and sent to a “special” school against his wishes, lays forlornly in a bathtub, hopelessly staring at the ceiling, lost in thought after yet another structureless day.
McQueen shoots each of these moments, as he has done so frequently throughout his career, in unbroken long takes, and duration has been a key element of his cinema since Hunger. McQueen tends to offer these extended moments of reflection as a way to underline key images and ideas in his work and illustrate the challenges faced by his characters. In Hunger a conversation in which a priest tries to talk Bobby Sands out of his hunger strike, shot in one 17 minute take, fails to change his resolve in a situation that, to Sands, cannot be changed out of political necessity, and in Shame, the ambiguity of the film’s ending undercuts Brandon’s emotional breakdown, brutally depicted in a rain-soaked, isolated mid-shot at the end of a pier, by presenting a world that will always be filled with temptation without showing whether he succumbs to it or not.
From 12 Years a Slave onwards, however, this approach changes, and McQueen shifts away from inescapability and begins to use long takes as a way to illustrate something more akin to qualified optimism. Solomon Northup, robbed of so much time and treated like an animal for more than a decade after being abducted and sold into slavery, is frequently subjected to, or witness of, dehumanising acts of violence presented in unflinching, extended detail, finally finds some justice in the world and returns to his family, all of whom have aged almost beyond his recognition. In Widows, the socio-economic disparity and the moral vacuum within political institutions that create such conditions, vividly demonstrated by an extended shot of a local politician privately berating his constituents as he’s driven to his gated home, may have endured another election, but each of the “widows” are finally able to claim independence on their own terms and build a better life for both themselves and the wider community. McQueen highlights the extraordinary challenges faced by his characters in these long takes, before showing the same characters rising up against these challenges as time passes. Tributaries to the river of systemic change.
And the same can be said of Small Axe. The Mangrove Nine successfully expose the racism of the police and are acquitted in court. Two lovers cycle freely around London in the early morning sun. A father and son reunite and raise a glass to a brighter future. Alex Wheatle is released from prison and sets out to write a book and find his family. A young boy slowly and enthusiastically reads aloud at the dinner table after finally being taught how to at Saturday school. McQueen never minimises or shies away from the challenges faced by the West Indian community in London, challenges that absolutely remain to this day, but these are not films about hopelessness. There is nothing that cannot be changed given time.
It’s quite frankly extraordinary that Small Axe exists. The idea that a filmmaker like Steve McQueen can make five feature-length works about Black life in Britain, that celebrate West Indian culture and confront the racism that exists within the UK, and have them broadcast on the BBC once a week for five weeks is a miracle, and one particularly important in 2020. Television guarantees an audience for works such as this that cinemas cannot even hope to replicate, even in more normal circumstances, and all five episodes of Small Axe were viewed by more than a million people each during their first broadcast¹. I don’t know if we’ve ever needed art as much as we do right now, and it’s an incredible thing to have free national access to such strong and forceful work from one of the leading British artists of the 21st Century. I really hope we see more of this kind of thing in 2021. Art seems to be the only thing right-wing Governments are afraid of. It might be the only way to change anything.
On a personal note, I’ve been lucky in many ways this year. I’m doing fine, and the horrors of this virus have for the most part evaded me so far. I’ve spent much of my time indoors, traveling vicariously by watching Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown from start to finish on Netflix and buying indie travel journals on Instagram. I’ve been digging into filmmakers like Ringo Lam, Nobuhiko Obayashi, and Budd Boetticher, among others, whose works I had never previously seen and knew only by reputation. I’ve also been watching the films of Alan Clarke, another British filmmaker who found a home for his work on the BBC, whose eviscerations of Tory Britain still remain relevant in a year in which the Government voted not to provide meals for children living in poverty in the midst of a public health crisis. Elsewhere, I’ve been running more than ever, and if circumstances allow me to do so I’ll be running my first half-marathon in April for the British Heart Foundation. I’ve also entered the ballot for the London Marathon, which may or may not be something that I’ll live to regret in the coming months. I’ve been listening to Phoebe Bridgers and Mac Miller, Waxahatchee and Fiona Apple, Yaeji and Lawrence Lek. I didn’t watch Contagion.
As of late November, I started watching
five new-to-me Vincente Minnelli melodramas over five consecutive Sunday afternoons as a way to bring some joy to the long winter nights stuck inside, building towards an end-of-year re-watch of
Brigadoon, maybe the most beautiful of all films. It feels important to end this year, a year of far too much death, of too many panic-stricken news reports and evasive press conferences, on a note of positivity, and I’m sure that Gene Kelly running back through the Scottish fog to Cyd Charisse will deliver something close to that. The idea of cinema as an escape from the fog has never felt more necessary yet more out of reach. I hope, for all our sakes, that reality becomes more palatable in 2021.
In alphabetical order:
Da 5 Bloods | Spike Lee
Days | Tsai Ming Liang
The History of the Seattle Mariners | Jon Bois & Alex Rubenstein
The Invisible Man | Leigh Whannell
Isabella | Matias Pineiro
Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always | Eliza Hittman
On The Rocks | Sofia Coppola
Siberia | Abel Ferrara
Small Axe | Steve McQueen
Tenet | Christopher Nolan
Undine | Christian Petzold
The Woman Who Ran | Hong Sang-soo
_________
My top twelve of the year is painfully English-language focused, and I don’t know whether I have an excuse for that. I don’t think I’ve been as discerning as I’d like to be over the past few years or so, nor do I think I’ve been as interesting. I was reading
a recent newsletter by Kelley Dong, a wonderful critic, about, among other things, their relationship with the films of Kim Ki-duk, who recently died from coronavirus while living in exile following multiple allegations of rape and assault. Dong writes: “Some might know that Kim was the reason that I became interested in film criticism. When first confronted with his films, I was extremely skeptical. But I was also overwhelmed with an obligation to cross that bridge from being a fan or detractor to a critic of an artist whose films stirred me as much as they upset me.” I feel as if I’m very much still on this bridge with regards to cinema, but I’m further than ever from being able to cross it. I mostly stopped writing notes at some point in mid-2019, and I don’t really write criticism anymore. Back when I did, I always tried to decipher the significance of a specific object or image within the context of a piece of work, as a means of giving an indirect sense of the whole thing — an approach best exemplified by my favourite piece of my own writing,
on Brian de Palma’s Femme Fatale.
I used to enjoy writing in this way, and I still think it’s a process that yields interesting results, but lately I’ve not been going as far as I used to. I’m still finding exciting and stimulating films to watch, but I seem to have unknowingly settled for the pleasant recognition of the strange patterns and symbolic objects that, until recently, I used as a starting point. This personal limitation has only been compounded by my burgeoning interest in genre cinema, where the structures and politics are more a part of the surface. It’s easy to look at, for example, a film like Ringo Lam’s City on Fire, a great film, and broadly understand its ideas without having to do too much heavy lifting, but there’s so much more to engage with in that film than the turbulence of its emotional gymnastics and the brutality of its action. I know there’s more there, and I do usually get a sense of it, but I’m not doing the work to push further and find it. I feel as if I’m becoming a passive spectator out of laziness, more than anything else, and I’d like to think this can be changed. I know it’s a matter of effort and desire, and perhaps finding these things again will be something I work towards next year. I don’t want to just sit and watch anymore. It’s not enough. One way or another, I have to cross the bridge.
_________
Ten discoveries from a year lived indoors. I’ve never been in a position to share
a fifty film longlist before, yet here we are. I hope I see fewer films next year.
Full Alert | Ringo Lam, 1997
Strange Days | Kathryn Bigelow, 1995
The Cobweb | Vincente Minnelli, 1955
Anne of the Indies | Jacques Tourneur, 1951
Road | Alan Clarke, 1987
Made in Hong Kong | Fruit Chan, 1997
Boat People | Ann Hui, 1982
Le Boucher | Claude Chabrol, 1970
Fat Girl | Catherine Breillat, 2001
His Motorbike, Her Island | Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1986
_________
Some highlights: 1) In Rotterdam, stumbling across a gorgeous exhibition of Robby Müller polaroids on a chilly Sunday afternoon in January after walking around aimlessly for hours, taking photos on a disposable camera that I’ve not been able to have developed. 2) In Berlin, hearing the words “Treptower Park” read out over the automated announcements on the S-Bahn from the airport into town, a station I’ve never actually been to but one whose name has ignited something undefinable within me each and every time I’ve passed through it. 3) The absolute horror that I and everyone else in the room felt simultaneously during the restaurant scene in
The Invisible Man, one of the most beautifully executed shocks I’ve seen in years and the last filmgoing experience I had before lockdown. 4) Beginning to make a concerted effort to improve myself physically and mentally in my free time. Both remain works in progress, and perhaps they always will do, but after spending the majority of my fading twenties in stasis, it feels nice to be active for a change. 5) And, finally, watching
seventeen bombastic thrillers of some form or other with friends in the group chat during the depths of lockdown, a genuinely joyful and revitalising communal experience in a sparse year for such things.
Be well in 2021.
