Steve McQueen | Research

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Steve Rodney McQueen


He is an English director, video artist, screenwriter and producer, known for 12 Years a Slave (2013), Shame (2011) and Hunger (2008). For his artwork, McQueen has received the Turner Prize, the highest award given to a British visual artist. He has also won an Academy Award, BAFTA Award for Best Film, Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Drama.


He has never been interested in pleasing mainstream tastes, but no matter how uncompromising his work, it keeps becoming more and more popular. People describe him as a very polite and businesslike person.

McQueen's film pitilessly documents the beatings, lynchings, rape and brutality of a slave-owning class half-demented by its own moral corruption, and routinely reduces audiences to tears. "There's been a kind of amnesia," he says, "or not wanting to focus on this, because of it being so painful. It's kind of crazy. We can deal with the second world war and the Holocaust and so forth and what not, but this side of history, maybe because it was so hideous, people just do not want to see. People do not want to engage."

HIS PERSONALITY AND LIFESTYLE SPEAKS FOR ITSELF - Maps & Networking. He always explored and tried to understand how things works together.
I found out how much McQueen uses nature of authority. He studied a lot of human senses. How they react, how they resist. He says that the human body is the art itself. He explores human relationships and tries to involve that in his films a lot.


In one of the interviews from The Guardian he admits that the reason why he reflects these relationships could be his memories. "This is hard because I'm going back to certain times in my life I haven't really thought about for a long time. And maybe I avoided that because it was always a very difficult time in a way, and a lot of people were damaged on that journey, friends of mine. And it was all because of people not giving a fuck." He was ignored and left with his own opinions alone.
About his childhood I found pretty interesting quote for that time, "Authority was good, that wasn't a problem. I wasn't a troublemaker, I was good. I was one of the cool kids, on account of being big and good at football". But in same time he admits that the most powerless in his life he felt during the time in school, it was horrible.




"I was a painter before, and it was always about the frame, of course. But within this frame, somehow, because of movement, because of things passing through the frame, it seemed to have a life bigger than the actual frame itself. That's the thing that gave me the passion to sort of want to make films." - Steve McQueen


Steve Rodney McQueen has explored a lot about the history. Reading his notes you can tell how  much he feels a shame and embarrassment about the history. 

His work "12 years a slave" shows politics and history more than anything else. Very powerful movie in my opinion. It shows slavery form different perspective letting audition feel like being there in the same time with everyone else. 

12 Years A Slave is based on a book McQueen's wife came across while he was working on an idea about a free African-American from the north kidnapped into slavery in the deep south. A prosperous black New York businessman, drugged by traffickers and sold into slavery, who escaped 12 years later and published a memoir detailing the horror of Louisiana plantation life.

I am not really into the history but watching the movie everything feels natural and real. Every single scene let us feel the motion of that time. How politics work at that time. You have money and power, you do whatever you want. Money was the power over humans. The racism and horrible attitude made the history that nobody wants to bring up.

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