Abstract

Hunger (2008), Steve McQueen’s first feature film, is about the 1981 Hunger Strike in Northern Ireland. He tells the story through prisoners’ bodies. This corporeal presentation creates a political discourse in the film: the progression of the narrative through imagery allows McQueen to show the fact of the matter rather than saying what is right or wrong. Hunger: Time Is In The Body aims to display the aestheticized corporeality of the film and argue that the film represents inner temporality and carries the marks of Deleuzian time-image. Objective corporeality as the fabric of the imagery manifests itself in the bodily resistance of the prisoners. Nevertheless, this imagery does not place the film within realism; in the film, the causal chain and the temporal line that we are accustomed to in classical cinema are constantly broken. The broken timeline is observable within the flow of corporeality, and the experience of dureé emerges by the density of such imagery. The spectator does not follow the narration; they follow the imagery because the timeline and the meaning are built through the bodies’ attitudes. In Deleuzian terms, the film can be observed as the cinema of bodies, which is a kind of time-image, and with that, it gets separated from the classical dramatic structure. In conclusion, this article suggests that in Hunger, Steve McQueen places time in the body through the critical objectivity of corporeality.