Human Size
Small Axe, five films by Steve McQueen, 2020.
WHEN THE movie theaters shut down in March of 2020, there was such a glut of films available through so many streaming services that it became nearly impossible to keep track of them. The tendency, which has grown exponentially over the course of the last twenty years, for critics’ groups and the Academy to focus on the same small collection of releases slimmed the chances for interesting small pictures to draw attention to themselves. At least if they had opened at art-houses in the few big cities that still have art-houses, ardent movie buffs who are in the habit of looking for prizes off the beaten path might have come across some of them and encouraged their friends to come out for them and seek them out on Netflix or Prime or Hulu. But all of us have been swimming in a sea of titles; it’s been far easier for most people to binge on series. I’ve tried to alert my friends to stand-out movies that few moviegoers seem to know about, like Mr. Jones, Miss Juneteenth, The Old Guard, The Jesus Rolls, Balloon, and Pietro Marcello’s Italian adaptation of Jack London’s Martin Eden—some of which were tip-offs from loyal former students who, like me, love surprises.
Among the most genuinely surprising recent movies are the quintet by the Anglo-Caribbean filmmaker Steve McQueen. Their highly individualized stories have been filtered through such a specific cultural experience—West Indians), the social-problem picture (), the coming-of-age movie (), and the triumph-of-the-spirit picture (both and )—but the uniqueness of the details undercuts their narrative conventionality. So does McQueen’s style, which is impassioned and fluid. It has a very unusual poetic vibrancy—especially in the second film, Rock—that is linked to the popular music, mostly reggae and rock, suffusing the soundtracks. And the five movies share a driving urgency. Only , the first, is the conventional two hours; all of the others run somewhere between sixty-five and eighty minutes.
