Watch: Steve McQueen’s Acute, Intense Eye for Detail

Steve McQueen would seem to be a filmmaker with considerable remove and detachment from his subjects, whose impartial and unflinching gaze heightens the shock in the subjects he depicts in such films as ‘12 Years a Slave‘ or ‘Shame,’ but the reality is that without an underpinning of attentiveness to small things, the films’ devastation would not be nearly as great. Alex Kalogeropoulos’s newest video piece, a look at the way McQueen depicts hands and fingers, tells the truth about McQueen’s method: while we may remember the scenes which, like certain paintings, command us to look at a whole vista, however disturbing, the moments of closeness are equally significant, asking the crucial question: Where is the humanity in this story of inhumanity?