There is no point pretending Steve McQueen’s study of Amsterdam during the German occupation doesn’t require significant investment.
Clocking in at more than 4½ hours, the documentary is unlikely to be challenged as longest new release of the year. The necessary and still chilling catalogue of horrors does little to sweeten that experience.
And there is something else. Sitting before the first screening at Cannes last year, many of us took 10 minutes or so to grasp a daunting truth: it is going to be like this all the way through. No archival footage. No talking heads. No maps.
Occupied City comprises 130 shots, taken with a largely static 35mm camera, of various sites in contemporary Amsterdam: a school, a park, a private home and so on. While we watch, Melanie Hyams’s impassive voiceover tells us about what happened in or near this place during the war. Never forget that the director of Hunger and 12 Years a Slave began his career with often-forbidding gallery-based video art.
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The film is a translation of Bianca Stigter’s rigorous book Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945. The author (also McQueen’s wife and a producer of this film) has noted that, rather than taking the chapters in order, readers sometimes use the text as a psychogeographical guide to the city – a tool to reveal the palimpsest beneath every facade. The film works similarly.
Progressing in no strict chronological fashion, it allows the buildings to tell their story in patchwork form. Sometimes the contrasts are sharp. A charming school was the former head of the German security police. Elsewhere, the ungovernable laws of time and space allow regrettable misinterpretations. McQueen has made it bluntly clear that shots of protests against lockdown – this is very much a pandemic project – are not in conscious conversation with the core history. No comparison is being made. No finger is being wagged at the present. This is just how the city was in 2020.
There is undeniably a deadening quality to the piece. The accumulation of atrocity is impossible to wholly take in. A walking tour with Stigter’s book allows opportunities to pause and contemplate that theatrical screenings won’t allow. Any loss of attention will inevitably cause viewers from outside the city – where McQueen has lived with Stigter for decades – to marvel at quite how ordered and harmonic Amsterdam now appears (in this lens, anyway). Turn the sound down and Occupied City becomes a soothing travelogue. There are, here, worthwhile conclusions to be made about how thoroughly reconstruction can wipe away traces of historical trauma.
McQueen and Stigter are in no apparent doubt as to the centrality of the Holocaust to that story. The text notes that a lower percentage of Jews returned to their homes than in any other European city. It shouldn’t take much of the 266 minutes for audience members to conclude that what matters most in contemporary footage is the people we are not seeing. The thousands who died. The thousands who were never born. To press that home, in rare deviation from the source, we end – allowing a future – with the bar mitzvah of a 21st-century Amsterdammer.
For all the undeniable power of Occupied City, some will wonder if, given its formal repetitions, the piece should not be presented as an installation. Maybe. But the concentration and lack of distraction allow that greater degree of immersion. That sense of being dragged through a narrative – even a non-linear one – is a vital part of its unsettling appeal.
McQueen has another answer. He is considering a 36-hour version of the piece that might yet play in galleries. What a singular artist he is.
