A Maze prison protest ends with a man refusing food to death, after a seventeen-minute static conversation with a priest (2008)
Hunger — Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands; it won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes.
Film · British & Irish
Steve McQueen
born 1969 · British
Gallery art into cinema — the durational image
Steve McQueen won the Turner Prize as a video artist before he made a feature film, and the gallery habits stayed: long static takes, bodies pushed to extremes, and a refusal to cut away. His first three features took a hunger strike, sexual compulsion and American slavery in turn, and the third made him the first black filmmaker to produce a Best Picture winner. He has since built an equally serious body of work about black British life, and continues to exhibit as an artist.
How to spot them
- ▸Extremely long takes held past comfort — a seventeen-minute two-hander at a table, a man running for minutes
- ▸The body as the subject: starvation, compulsion, flogging, endurance
- ▸A painterly, static frame with almost no camera movement, then one sudden move
- ▸Michael Fassbender in the first three features; cinematographer Sean Bobbitt
- ▸He moves between gallery installation and cinema and treats them as the same practice
Key films
An immaculate Manhattan executive's sexual compulsion collapses when his sister moves into his flat (2011)
Shame — Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan; the Volpi Cup at Venice.
A free violinist from Saratoga Springs is drugged, sold south, and left hanging on tiptoe in the mud for a whole afternoon (2013)
12 Years a Slave — the story of Solomon Northup; Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
Four Chicago widows take on their dead husbands' unfinished armed robbery to pay off a debt (2018)
Widows — co-written with Gillian Flynn, with Viola Davis.
Five London films, from a Notting Hill restaurant trial to a blues party filmed almost entirely in one room (2020)
Small Axe — the BBC anthology including Mangrove and Lovers Rock.
A nine-year-old is evacuated from a bombed London, jumps from the train and walks back to find his mother (2024)
Blitz — Saoirse Ronan and Elliott Heffernan.
A silent atlas of one occupied city's addresses, read over footage of the same streets under lockdown (2023)
Occupied City — a four-hour documentary about wartime Amsterdam.
Key ideas
- Duration is the argument: making the audience wait is how the film makes its point
- Art and cinema as one continuous practice rather than two careers
- Recovering black British history as a mainstream national subject, not a niche one
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in west London on 9 October 1969 to Grenadian and Trinidadian parents; he studied at Chelsea, Goldsmiths and briefly at NYU
- •He won the Turner Prize in 1999, for work including the Buster Keaton homage Deadpan
- •He was an official war artist in Iraq in 2003; the resulting work, Queen and Country, presented dead British servicemen as sheets of stamps
- •Hunger (2008), his first feature, won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes
- •12 Years a Slave (2013) won Best Picture, making him the first black filmmaker to have produced a Best Picture winner
- •Year 3 (2019) photographed tens of thousands of London seven-year-olds for a Tate Britain installation
- •He was appointed CBE in 2011 and knighted in 2020
- •He revealed in 2024 that he had been treated for prostate cancer
- •In 2026 he won the Erasmus Prize, served as Harvard's Norton Professor of Poetry, and showed a new work, Atlas
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Tate — Steve McQueen
- Artforum — British Filmmaker Steve McQueen Wins 2026 Erasmus Prize