One of Britain’s leading film and television directors, the award-winning artist Steve McQueen, has expressed his dismay at the lack of response by politicians to his film Grenfell, a powerful visual statement on the devastating London fire of 2017. The UK’s political class has, he says, largely avoided coming to watch it.
“Their silence says a lot about what is happening in this country. If MPs are turning their backs on something like this film, what does it mean?” McQueen told the Observer.
He invited dozens of MPs to watch his 24-minute film at the Serpentine Gallery in London. So far, with only three days to go before the screenings end on Wednesday, McQueen said that he knows of only four politicians who have replied and visited.
They are the former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, Kensington MP Felicity Buchan, Michael Gove, the housing secretary, and David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, who lost a friend in the fire and who was to attend a screening this weekend.
The vast majority of those invited have failed even to reply, McQueen said. “The fact that all these other MPs have been invited and yet haven’t had the courtesy to even respond is just not good enough. It is one of these situations, whether they are Labour or Conservative, where they should have had the decency to reply,” the London-born artist said.
His short, wordless film has been widely hailed as one of the most direct and politically powerful artworks shown in Britain in recent years, making an apparently equally positive impact on critics, traumatised neighbours and members of those families bereaved by the fire in North Kensington, which killed 72 people.
McQueen, who won the best picture Oscar for his 2013 film 12 Years a Slave and the Turner prize for contemporary art in 1999, said he does not believe that the failure of so many MPs to respond can be excused because they are unsure how to approach a work of modern art.
“I don’t know whether it can be that,” he said. “After all, this is the country of Shakespeare and of William Blake and of [David] Hockney, so I don’t know why that should be the case. They are educated people. And anyway, this is all about Grenfell and they should have been able to understand that. It is just a short walk from parliament.”
The generally appreciative reaction to McQueen’s Grenfell film has been in marked contrast to more suspicious feelings voiced recently in the Kensington area about plans to make a BBC television drama series covering the events leading up to the fire and its political aftermath, and to a National Theatre play that will be based on verbatim accounts from survivors and others of those affected.
McQueen, who recently made the popular television film series Small Axe for the BBC, said it was not up to him to say whether his Grenfell film was judged more acceptable because there was no dialogue.
“That is for others to decide,” he said. “All I know is that I was very happy with the response from those who have seen it. It is not a feature film. It is not a TV series. It is an artwork. And it is all about the subject matter. The content, I think, always dictates the right form for something to take.”
Writing about his artwork last month, he said: “When I heard about the fire, I needed to do something. I was in pain like many other people at witnessing a tragedy that simply did not have to happen, yet did due to deliberate neglect. The question for me at the time was: ‘How do I engage with this tragedy?’ The only thing I could think of was to visit the building again, after nearly 30 years.”
McQueen had family friends in the area and in his youth had run a clothing stall in nearby Portobello Road: “There was a wonderful energy, a familiarity, an exchange which was unlike anywhere else in London. Also, it was cool. There was a buzz. There was proudness. You were in the right place.”
The film-maker is to take his first documentary to the Cannes film festival later this month. Titled Occupied City, it is set in Amsterdam during the second world war. McQueen said his art and entertainment projects are always political “because everything is political”.
“Even falling in love is political,” he added. “Nothing can be divorced from it.” McQueen recently expressed his concern that Grenfell Tower would fade from public memory and so was determined to make sure it was not forgotten, whether or not there are criminal prosecutions.
This weekend he said he would still welcome any politicians who now decide to come to see the film in its final few screening days and that he hoped more would at least respond to the invitation. “The idea is for it tour around Britain at some point,” he said.
The film is dedicated to those who died in the fire, to the survivors and the bereaved, and public screenings at the gallery followed a period of private viewings, which prioritised bereaved families and survivors. After its presentation at the Serpentine, the work will be placed in the care of the Tate and the Museum of London’s collections.
