Perhaps no one is better placed to make a film about Grenfell than Steve McQueen. He grew up in nearby White City, where his father was a prominent community figure. He even visited friends in the tower.
And he has a record for unflinching evocations of injustice, whether that’s in cinematic masterpieces like 12 Years a Slave or his magnificent BBC television series Small Axe, focusing on historic resilience and resistance in London’s West Indian community.
He could – and might still – make a narrative film about this subject but for now, with Grenfell, he is firmly back where he began, with video installation. His work in this field often adopts a simple formal strategy and repeats it, pushing it to an extreme, in order to hit home directly with his audience. Here, he uses a technique he employed when he made Static, his 2009 film of the Statue of Liberty – using a helicopter to repeatedly, disorientingly circle his subject.
That subject is what the professor of humanities at UCL, Paul Gilroy, describes in an aptly searing text about the project, as “the charred obscenity” of the tower, captured on a beautiful day in December 2017, six months after the fire. McQueen has kept this material back for years out of respect for the victims, the bereaved and the survivors; now it’s unleashed, and it is suitably brutal.
The film begins deep in the suburbs, in England’s green and pleasant land, with London a mirage amid pollution haze to the right of the frame. Slowly, inexorably, sickeningly, it moves closer, before the ashy form of Grenfell looms at the centre of the screen. The atmospheric sound – it starts with birdsong, before the hum of roads and planes around the city takes over – cuts to silence. And the whirling begins.
In a single shot, for about 20 minutes, we’re forced to contemplate the husk of the 24-storey tower: its blackened frame and core; that wretched foam beneath the cladding, singed and charred, with the original, virtually incombustible concrete intact beneath; through windows, clusters of pink and white bags stacked together, containing who knows what debris; PPE-clad forensics teams going about their grim tasks. Occasionally the camera pans out before zooming in again, seemingly urging us to keep looking. Finally, briefly, it is still, fixing our gaze on the building, close-up, for a few last moments.
This relentless, devastating, surveillance-style approach feels necessary. It is undramatic, unembellished. Nothing happens, and nothing needs to: you just have the evidence of the building, the raw fact that this horrific spectacle was allowed to happen here, in the same borough as Hyde Park and the Serpentine; one of the wealthiest areas, in one of the richest countries in the world, in the 21st century.
As the inquiry has heard, behind it lay negligence, corruption, and a flagrant disregard for human life and dignity, perpetuated by multiple parties, who then engaged in what the lead counsel called a “spider’s web of blame”.
For McQueen, it is about remembering this. Appropriately, as we leave, on the wall is a list of the 72 people who died. Among them are six members of the Choucair family. The youngest, Zainab, was three years old.
I felt enraged, sickened, ashamed all over again. You must see this film.
