Forget In the Name of the Father – except perhaps for the title, because the connotations of that title lurk (inevitably?) in this skeleton of the Bobby Sands story, and annex (irresistibly?) the writing and reading of the images. It’s so present, and so urgent, that one can’t help wondering if there was any way to avoid it, if indeed there ever is, or is the body politic in Western culture bound irrevocably to act as the body of Christ? Of course, given the Catholic context, one could argue that it would have been a distortion to do anything else here, since the iconography belongs to the experience – and besides the audience is free to question it. McQueen isn’t sanctifying arguments, since he doesn’t really present any: he isn’t even sanctifying actions, since their justification is questioned. Mostly he’s observing. The observation hurts. It homes in on the body and the flesh to such an extent that it breaks the comforting illusion of film – whose is this body, really, this actor’s body that can’t possibly be acting, and what the hell is he doing? The what takes precedence over the why, with its own striking conviction, its immediacy – and, arguably, its neutral irrationality which finds its own way into meaning, not always controllably. If it speaks it speaks about despair, and it speaks – and would even despite itself – about Catholicism, because the unconscious Fassbender/Sands in a hostile jailer’s arms looks like a Pietà, and connects to everything that image ever said or meant, and the image becomes a positive bombardment of meanings and emotional connections. It speaks about conviction, but it says next to nothing about republicanism.It speaks not to the ideas involved, desirable or undesirable, but to the situation they’re in: as the central debate suggests, it’s an irrationality in response to an irrationality That the situation is intolerable has been made sufficiently clear. The detail, let alone the merits, of the Republican position aren’t even at issue. Which in a sense is how it should be – to this response the appropriate causes, and no others, are given, but the Christian iconography complicates the question, because it carries ideas with its images, and in the absence of the relevant arguments they slip in, subliminally, to fill the void. And so a response to a situation becomes the proof of a position …

Dying was not ALL that Bobby Sands was about.

Actually, the structure of the film is rather awkward: relatively short, but extraordinarily intense, it clips itself into two, or, with the long debating-scene in the centre separate again from the rest, into three: part I is about dirt and violence rather than hunger – close-up images trying to connect with other, more visceral, senses – and it belongs to a relatively unknown and unprepared young man (quite unknown to me) who then vanishes from the film. Was he one of the other nine hunger-strikers who died subsequently? (No, apparently – their names for the record, since the film doesn’t offer it, were: Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, Patsy O’Hara, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Keven Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee, Michael Devine. Just in the name of equity, since all ten must have gone through the same). The intensity of the ‘Hunger’ section is so great, it was only in retrospect that I realised a character was lost; on realisation, it seemed a little like a desertion.

Between Part I and Part II comes a long confrontation between Sands and a Catholic priest – a similar strategy to that adopted in ‘Sophie Scholl’, forcing the audience in the middle of the film to step back and to assess arguments. What is at issue is the ethics of hunger striking in this situation, the foundation of the subject of the film – something approaching the issues it raises itself, although the debate regards the urgency of doing, not the complications of showing. It’s even longer than the argument in ‘Sophie Scholl’, it’s not certainly resolved except as regards the practicalities of what will happen, it represents an interestingly demanding strategy for engaging films with issues which stands out all the more here given that everything else that happens in this prison or in this film is viscerally non-verbal.

It’s very powerful – I guess you can tell that by the time I’ve spent circling it. It’s probably important – but partly because of the political questions it raises, no? yes/YES, she says, wary.