Opening excerpt The Liberation of Steve McQueen A decade and a half ago, the British filmmaker Steve McQueen took a plane to Grenada, the tiny West Indian island, to visit a beautiful place where something horrible once happened. The place was Caribs Leap, a tall cliff overlooking the Caribbean Sea, and it had long haunted his imagination. McQueens father, born in Grenada, and his mother, who moved there from neighboring Trinidad, told him in his youth about how, in 1651, some 40-odd members of the islands dwindling indigenous population, the Caribs, were cornered by armed French colonists. Backed up against the cliff, they faced a bleak dilemma – be killed or be captured – and chose a third option. They threw themselves into the sea, McQueen says today. Its one of those things that was always etched in my mind. The result of McQueens pilgrimage was a somber gallery installation called Caribs Leap, in which he set images of contemporary island life on one screen and footage of bodies in a slow-motion freefall on another. The Caribs mass suicide – its sense of principled self-obliteration in the face of a conquering force – still stuns him. They transformed themselves, McQueen says. They transcended themselves. Read more: rollingstone/movies/news/the-liberation-of-steve-mcqueen-20140303#ixzz2uvbsIBRa Yeah Im smitten.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Mar 2014 19:07:49 +0000
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