Steve McQueen’s short documentary simply entitled Grenfell is the most poignant artistic response that has yet been created to the fire that swept through the twenty-four storey Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017 in which 72 people lost their lives. The film opens with a quasi-bucolic aerial panorama beyond the edge of London accompanied by intense ambient noise. Almost imperceptibly we are drawn very slowly towards the increasing density of metropolitan London: golf courses and gently curving suburban roads gradually give way to more tightly packed residential streets, signs of light industry, and the criss-crossing of roads and railway lines. As the helicopter-eye view moves ever closer to the group of West London hi-rise housing blocks the pale grey inhabited towers mark a striking juxtaposition with the blackened shell of Grenfell. The background noise fades to complete silence as we slowly begin to circle the charred exterior of the building. The blackened walls contrast with heat distorted materials and raw red patches. Rather than an architecture of trauma à la Daniel Liebeskind we are confronted with architecture as trauma. Filmed in December 2017 the winter light accentuates the combination of harsh colours and absence of life. The mood is meditative and shocking. Ever so gradually the camera begins to draw back. The subsonic shell of ambient sound returns as if the clarity of loss is now threatened by a kind of “white noise” in which memory, responsibility, and justice must jostle to be heard.
