English filmmaker Steve McQueen is one of the most fascinating and unclassifiable directors working. Best known for “12 Years a Slave” (2013), the Oscar-winning adaptation of the memoir of Solomon Northup, McQueen’s career stretches back to the early ’90s; he began as a painter, then moved on to experimental film in a Warholian vein before making his narrative feature debut with 2008’s “Hunger.” McQueen’s most ambitious project to date is arguably “Small Axe” (2020), an anthology of five films, ranging in length from just under one hour to just over two, all focusing on the West Indian immigrant experience in London at different points in the 20th century.
Throughout the fall, the Harvard Film Archive has been running free screenings of the “Small Axe” series, celebrating McQueen’s appointment as Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry, one of very few filmmakers to hold the title. On Tuesday, McQueen returns to Harvard for the second of six planned Norton Lectures, discussing “Small Axe” on the occasion of its fifth anniversary. The next visit is Nov. 6. In anticipation of the event, Cambridge Day spoke with McQueen about its making, release during the Covid lockdown of 2020 and the joy to be found in the midst of tragedy. This conversation has been edited lightly for length and clarity.
What is the origin of the title “Small Axe?”
The origin of the title comes from a Bob Marley lyric, but actually it’s an African proverb. “If you are the big tree, we are the small axe,” meaning, as a collective, we could move mountains. As a collective, we could do anything.
The first of the films that I saw was “Lovers Rock” when it played at the virtual New York Film Festival in 2020. It felt so poignant to see it at that moment, given that it’s so much a film about gathering and community. Obviously that wouldn’t have been something that you could have known while you were making it, but was that something that crossed your mind as it came closer to release, or during the film’s reception?
Actually, it was released in a drive-in movie theater. The New York Film Festival erected a sort of an outdoor cinema for “Small Axe,” particularly “Lovers Rock” [which was the opening night film]. And people went crazy! They’re coming out of their cars, dancing and so forth. It was pretty euphoric, from all reports. With film, the timing is very important. Of course, the movie stands on its own, but the time couldn’t have been much more important. I think everyone was losing their sense of community and solidarity and being in a room with other people, so I imagine to see that conjured a lot of emotion. I imagine that’s why there was a euphoric nature to how people received it at that time – not just obviously at that drive-in, but elsewhere, at home. I got numerous calls and contacts from so many people who I would never have thought that I would have contact with. It was pretty amazing.
So much of that film is told in long, extended dance scenes rather than dialogue. Did it feel different directing those scenes than it might in a more conventional narrative?
Well, I don’t do conventional. I don’t know what that is. For me, it’s what is necessary for the narrative, what’s necessary for the story. I’m not restrained or restricted by conventions, because I don’t understand them – I just make films. Whatever makes the best results. So I don’t know what conventional is, really. It just has to be good, I suppose.
Moving on to “Mangrove,” which in some ways feels like the most ambitious of the films and is certainly the longest, with the largest cast: Was it clear from the beginning that this was going to be one that would need a little more space to breathe?
Yeah. We knew the story of the court case, at the time the longest court case in British history, and what was at stake. So the canvas was quite larger in the sense of what it was visually, if not necessarily what it was saying, because of the settings. We had Old Bailey, the highest court in land. We had scuffles with the police, we had uprisings, we had demonstrations. There was a lot going on. So therefore, yes, I understood how we had to do that. But also, as a European filmmaker, what we’re good at, if I could say that, because we don’t normally have the money to do these kind of things: We have to stretch a pound! [laughs] We don’t have a lot of money, but what we do have is ideas. We had to just work with that. And again, there is a certain kind of conventionality to it, to some extent, or familiarity for some viewers, because it is a court case. But this is a different kind of court case. It’s a different kind of court film, because there’s three stages, the last being the court case, and the vindication.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, in a way, is “Education,” which is such an intimate story about such a specific chapter in education in England. Could you talk a little bit about the so-called “educationally subnormal” schools?
What was happening was a lot of first-generation West Indian and Caribbean children in the U.K. were being allocated to these remedial schools, and people couldn’t understand what was going on. It was just blatant racism. The parents and academics at that time came together in order to stop it, in order to draw attention to what was going on to the children. Everyone was being lumped into these “subnormal” schools who didn’t belong there … It was like the small axe itself, people coming together, parents and Black academics, to change the narrative, to stop these schools. And they succeeded.
“Alex Wheatle” and “Red White and Blue” strike me as sort of bookends – true stories of these two men experiencing the legal system from different ends. What was it about these two particular stories that drew you to them?
Alex was a person that was working with me when we had a writer’s room for “Small Axe.” It was more to do with all the stuff he lived through. The thing about film is that, if these stories aren’t put out there, they kind of never existed as such. I think what happens is these films sort of reshape history. That was, for me, very important, that we could retell and reshape history. That’s the power of cinema, you know? That’s what it does. Because who tells these stories? Who’s able to tell these stories can actually shape the narrative of the past, and how it reflects on to the future. What was great for me about “Small Axe” was all these young people looking at these stories and asking their parents or their grandparents, “Did that really happen? Is that what was going on?” And therefore it reshapes history.
One of the things that I love about these films is that they obviously shine a very harsh light on some very hard truths, but they all have these moments of joy and hope in them as well.
You can’t have tragedy without joy. With Leroy Logan [the protagonist of “Red White and Blue”] for example – that was the first film ever projected at Scotland Yard, if you could believe it. I don’t know who went – three or four policemen, I don’t know – but it was the first one ever projected in Scotland Yard. So it tells you how far we’ve come for that to happen.
You’re coming back to Harvard in November for the “Bass” exhibition. Could you talk a little bit about what people might expect from that?
A lot of bass. [laughs] A lot of bass!
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