Film Screening: ‘Shame’ (Steve McQueen, 2011)

Thursday 20th February, 2014

6pm, Hitchcock Cinema, Arts One

Introduced by Dr Katherine Angel
Shame is written and directed by Steve McQueen, Turner Prize-winning video artist and director of Hunger and 12 Years A Slave. Widely glossed (including by McQueen himself) as a film about sex addiction, Shame is a fine-grained portrait of sexual compulsion and suffering. Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, an office worker in New York in his mid-thirties whose routine is peppered with somewhat joyless pornography use, masturbation, the chasing of casual encounters, and visits from sex workers. Brandon’s sister (Carey Mulligan) comes to visit, which creates tensions in which Brandon’s suffering peaks. Shame is a film that reveals contemporary anxieties about pornography and addiction, while reflecting deftly on questions of humiliation, aggression, gender, and power.