It Starts With Darkness:Steve McQueen's Grenfell.

It starts with darkness.

It ends with darkness too.

But Steve McQueen's Grenfell film, now on show at the Serpentine South gallery, was made on a clear and sunny day. Footage, presumably filmed from a drone, shows the suburbs of London. There are, at first, no recognisable landmarks. 

The camera moves in to London itself. We fly over Wembley Stadium. In the far distance we can see skyscrapers but we can't quite make them out. It's hazy. Soon we see tower blocks and not long after that we notice one of the tower blocks looks different to the others. It's darker. Something has happened.

There's no narration, no speaking at all, in McQueen's film but we all know it's Grenfell Tower and we all know what happened there on the 14th June 2017. McQueen has made a film about a deadly fire before. Uprising told the story about the New Cross house fire in which thirteen young people lost their lives in 1981 and in Uprising, McQueen gives survivors their voice. He also tells of the events leading up the fire (NF marches, racist police behaviour) and the events that followed it (the Black People's Day of Action and the Brixton riots).

Grenfell has no context whatsoever. It's still too raw. Perhaps it doesn't need context. At least not yet. It's still fresh in everyone's mind. Perhaps the silence of McQueen's film speaks louder than anything a narrator could say. McQueen was eager to make the film before the Grenfell Tower was covered up, before the events started fading from the public memory, before those that bear the most responsibility for allowing this to happen take control of the narrative.

When the drone reaches Grenfell, the humming sound cuts out. We are in complete silence as we circle round and round the burnt out tower. We see life around the tower going on as normal. Traffic continues along the Westway and tube trains pull in and out of Latimer Road station. Closer to the tower itself we can just about make out men in hi-viz jackets, presumably working on the tower.

The tower itself though is a graveyard in the heart of the city. The London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea contains areas of enormous wealth, Holland Park is perhaps a five minute walk from Grenfell, but it also contains areas of deprivation and poverty. It is depressing that people should burn to death anywhere in the world. It is criminal they should do so in a city as wealthy as London.

The drone surveys the building. We look into the burnt out rooms where people lived their lives, brought up their families, watched television, ate their meals, and slept. There is no sign of life now. The sandbags in some of the rooms seem to stand as grim mementos to those that were lost.

If it feels that McQueen has chosen to linger too long on the site of Britain's most lethal residential fire since World War II then that is probably correct too. The discomfort many of us watching will feel is exactly how it should be. Looking at a site where seventy-two people died is, and should be, uncomfortable. Looking at it in silence even more so.

When the film finishes nobody says anything. We walk out into one final room in which the names of each and every victim of the Grenfell Tower fire is listed. There are two things you notice immediately. Two things we all knew anyway but they still hit home.

The first thing is that the same surnames crop up over and over. Ibrahim, Deen, Elgwahry, Haftom, Vital, Tucca-Ahmedin, Belkadi. Five members of the Miah-Begum family. Five members of the El-Wahabi family. Six members of the Kedir family. Six members of the Choucair family over three generations. Entire families wiped out in a totally avoidable disaster.

The second thing you notice is that most, but not all, of the people who died at Grenfell were not white. The white ones who died were not rich white people. Their lives, our society has tacitly decided, is not worth as much as those who live in the luxury flats spread all over the capital and all over the country. It's almost impossible to imagine the same thing being allowed to happen in those buildings. If those who lived in the luxury flats had complained about dangerous cladding it would have been removed. It most likely would never have been installed in the first place.

Steve McQueen, in a leaflet you pick up on entering the gallery talks about visiting Grenfell Tower in the nineties. He talks about the views, he talks about the "energy", the "buzz", and the "proudness" and, more than anything, he talks about the sense of community he felt among those that called it home.

The sociologist Paul Gilroy, in an essay included in that leaflet, talks of how, in our "bitterly divided country" the aftermath of Grenfell is of "only marginal interest to government and the complacent political class that serves it". He talks of how time itself was weaponised by the powerful who have used it to generate fatigue and hopelessness amongst opponents who seek justice.

He talks of corruption, power, greed, and cruelty and he talks of unregulated capitalism. He doesn't mention individual names of politicians but then he doesn't need to. We all know who was in charge running up to, at the time of, and after the Grenfell fire. He makes comparison to Hillsborough when he considers the question of "who can be killed without consequences?"

Nearly six years after the fire, none of the safety recommendations made to ensure this doesn't happen again have been implemented. The victims of the Grenfell fire should never have died. Nothing can ever bring them back. But at least we could have used this terrible loss to do everything we can to make sure something like this never happens again. We haven't done that.

It starts with darkness.

It ends with darkness too.