Steve McQueen's photographic eye

Steve McQueen came to cinema from visual art, and the discipline of his background has produced one of the most controlled directorial eyes in contemporary cinema. His films — Hunger, Shame, 12 Years a Slave, Widows, Small Axe, Blitz — are all recognisably his in a way that few other contemporary directors' work is, and the recognisability is not a matter of style so much as of visual argument. Every McQueen frame is doing specific compositional work.

The most famous example is still the twelve-minute unbroken shot in Hunger — Michael Fassbender and Liam Cunningham in conversation, camera static, the audience asked to sit inside the scene for as long as it lasts. That shot became a technical reference point, but it is worth remembering that the more interesting decision was not the length of the take but the willingness to sit with the argument the scene was making. McQueen's cinema is composed for argument, not for pace.

Small Axe is arguably the most sustained example of that method. Each of the five films uses a specific visual register to argue for a specific piece of the West Indian British experience — Lovers Rock is composed almost entirely as light and movement, while Mangrove is composed for institutional weight, and Alex Wheatle for the interior of a specific room. That McQueen produced all five in a single production cycle, at that level of visual variety, is a compositional achievement without an obvious peer.

The critique of McQueen's work is a fair one about emotional register. His films are often held at a specific analytical distance from their material, and audiences who want the immersive emotional access that mainstream drama provides sometimes find his cinema cold. That is a real critique, and McQueen has occasionally addressed it in his more recent work — Small Axe and Blitz are both warmer than the earlier features — but the analytical distance is a feature of his practice rather than a bug.

What McQueen's cinema demonstrates, and what the industry has been slow to fully credit, is that a director trained in visual art can bring a specific kind of compositional literacy that cinema-only directors sometimes lack. That is not an argument for visual-art training as a route into directing — most visual artists do not become directors — but it is an argument for taking the compositional side of the craft as seriously as McQueen does. The next generation of directors would benefit from watching his shot lists as carefully as they watch his films.