In the Scene : An Exploration of the Director and His Work

"A readable and wide-ranging consideration of McQueen’s work." ― Kirkus Reviews

Part of our new series of accessible introductory guides to significant contemporary filmmakers, this guide is a must for film fans and students of contemporary cinema alike. An introductory chapter highlights thematic and visual devices, followed by an exploration of British director Steve McQueen’s work, from his short films and video art through his critically acclaimed feature films, including his masterpiece, the Academy Award-winning 12 Years A Slave, to his BBC TV series Small Axe and the new war film, Blitz.
Londoner Steve McQueen shot to fame in 1999 when he won the prestigious Turner Prize for innovative art. In 2020, the Tate Gallery in London held an exhibition of over a dozen works spanning film, photography and sculpture, including his homage to the African American actor and civil rights activist Paul Robeson. Ranging across the visual arts, to advertising, documentary and drama, McQueen often tackles hard-hitting topics such as discrimination and injustice in powerful, cinematic ways.

Includes interviews with historian, David Olusoga and director of film programming at the Lincoln Center, Dennis Lim.

Table of Contents

author bio; introduction; timeline; review of films, docs; art, exhibitions

David is one of the UK’s foremost historians
whose main subject areas are
empire, race and slavery. He was honoured
with an OBE in 2019.
Born in Lagos, Nigeria, to a Nigerian
father and British mother, he migrated
to the UK with his mother as a child.
He grew up in Gateshead and lived on
a council estate where his family suffered racist abuse from the
National Front. He later attended the University of Liverpool to
study the history of slavery.
Olusoga became a television producer after graduating, and later
a presenter, working on programmes such as Black and British: A
Forgotten History, A House Through Time and the BAFTA awardwinning
Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners.
As a writer, his books include Civilizations: Encounters and the Cult
of Progress, The World’s War, which won First World War Book of
the Year, Black & British: A Forgotten History, which was awarded
both the Longman-History Today Trustees Award and the PEN
Hessell-Tiltman Prize and The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s
Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism. With his
siblings Yinka and Kemi, he co-created the book Black History for
Every Day of the Year.
He was appointed Professor of Public History at the University of
Manchester in 2019.

Dennis is Artistic Director of the New
York Film Festival. From 2013 to 2022,
as Director of Programming at Film
at Lincoln Center, he co-chaired the
New Directors/New Films selection
committee, co-founded the Art of the
Real festival, and organized numerous
programs, including retrospectives of
Jane Campion, George Cukor, Christian Petzold, Raúl Ruiz, Agnès
Varda, and John Waters. He was previously the film editor of The
Village Voice and the editorial director of the Museum of the
Moving Image, and was the programmer of the 2010 Flaherty
Film Seminar. He has served on multiple festival juries, including
Sundance, Cannes Critics Week, Locarno, and San Sebastián, and
as an advisor for the Berlinale, the Mumbai Film Festival, and the
Thessaloniki Film Festival.
In 2018 he received the French Ministry of Culture’s Chevalier of
the Arts and Letters. He has written for The New York Times, The
Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, and Film Comment,
and taught film studies at Harvard and arts criticism at NYU. His
2015 book David Lynch: The Man from Another Place has been
translated into three languages. His latest book, Tale of Cinema
(2022), is a monograph on the Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo.