Caribs' Leap / Western Deep: Press coverage

Sight & Sound, December 2002

Time Out, 25 September – 2 October 2002:
“Like fairgrounds in winter, the abandoned Lumiere cinema is achingly nostalgic. Steve McQueen’s double video installation is a good use of the venue’s gutted architecture: Caribs’ Leap plays on one side of a large petition halfway down the ampitheatre’s steps; then, when that finishes, the audience walks round to the other side to view Western Deep. Caribs' Leap was shown as a single projection at Documenta this year, but Robbie Muller’s cinematography eclipsed the issues of the content so that it was hard to think of it as purely a Steve McQueen piece. Here, however, it has been re-edited and reconfigured into a two-screen projection...” (Sally O’Reilly)

Sight and Sound, December 2002:
“On one screen a wandering camera captures dogs and goats, children playing, fishing boats crossing the velvety swell, ending with a figure seated on a jetty silhouetted against the sunset. It’s a panorama of the unremarkable rituals of everyday life, but with an eye always on mortality: a visit to the local undertaker reveals the dead laid out in ornate open coffins, an upturned boat is found ablaze, its peeling hull and feathers of burning wood a tapestry of distress.

“The score consists of the muffled stir of the sea, sounding at times like the smothered whirr of a projector. And balancing this footage on the larger screen opposite is an image of a wide-open sky with tiny figures falling at irregular intervals across the void.” (Gareth Evans)

The Daily Telegraph, 15 October 2002:
“To say that Steve McQueen’s new film, Western Deep, is a staggering achievement barely does it justice…. It is one of the most physically powerful pieces of film-making I’ve ever experienced.
…[Western Deep] plunges us into the heart of darkness, two miles below one of South Africa's largest gold mines. The screen, quarry-huge, is black as oil. Drilling machines blast out a bowel-quakingly loud noise. After a while, thanks to the murky dribbles of light from the workers' helmets, we can just about detect the silhouettes of the miners. They're ghost-men, Styx-dwellers, post-colonial serfs. The lights go out, the drilling stops: it's hard to tell whether the blackness is coming from the screen, the cinema, or whether it's our eyes that are closed.” (Sukhdev Sandhu – read full article)

The Observer, 6 October 2002:
“This is the darkest film I've ever seen. A lift descends blindly, goes miles underground, carrying its workers - and us with them - like damned men. We long for light - occasionally there's a flash of metal, a grid like a turquoise waffle sliding by in the dark. The camera mines not for gold but for disconcerting glimpses of human flesh. And when, at last, we surface, it is to witness the miners feverish, thermometers in their mouths. McQueen has said this is not political. It cannot be anything else.“ (Kate Kellaway – read full article)

The Guardian, 8 October 2002
“McQueen's interest in the fundamentals of the act of filming has always included its staging, a preoccupation with how and where his films are shown and with the place of the audience, psychologically as much as physically.

“This is where film as art, and Western Deep, get really interesting. Instead of "taking you out of yourself" his films remind you of your own presence, in a particular space, engaging with the particularities of what is happening in the here and now of the cinematic experience. This, for McQueen, is film's space, a place as much as it is a projected narrative. The periods of silence, the intermittent light, the camera burrowing into near-dark and illuminating glimpses of things that are very close, seen only partially, is itself close to what the workers in this mine experience every minute of every shift.” (Adrian Searle – read full article)

RA Magazine, December 2002
“In Western Deep, McQueen dares to defy the current vogue for artistic solipsism – moving from work that is largely self-referential to that which is socially engaged, and provoking questions in the viewer about moral sensibility. In a British art world not normally known either for its political concern or its ethical positioning, where style tends to take precendence over concerned content, McQueen’s new works feel both timely and refreshing.” (Sue Hubbard)