Occupied City: Steve McQueen’s Original Take of Amsterdam Under the Nazis
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
The British director Steve McQueen (Hunger, 12 Years A Slave) has shown no reticence about depicting violence or the nightmares of history. Later this year, we can expect more of the same when he releases Blitz, a drama starring Saoirse Ronan about Londoners during the German bombing of 1940-41.
Until then, we have something quite different. Occupied City is a 266-minute Holocaust documentary with an approach that sidesteps the numbing cliches and concerns about the ethical representation of atrocity. His film includes no archival material or interviews and takes place entirely in the streets of contemporary, open-minded Amsterdam.
The city is McQueen’s adopted home where he lives with his wife Bianca Stigter, the director of Holocaust documentary, Three Minutes: A Lengthening. McQueen’s film was inspired by Stitger’s book, Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-45, a Holocaust city guide, accompanied by accounts of the people who lived there and what happened to them.
In total, McQueen’s film visits 130 different addresses in the city as narrator Melanie Hyams recounts in a calm, neutral tone the many episodes of fanatical violence that took place there. Periodically, cinematographer Lennert Hillege’s camera moves inside to reveal the interiors of tony apartments and workplaces, where contemporary residents practice yoga, do Zoom meetings, play guitar, dance, or play video games.
The accounts are not chronological, hopping from address to address, a litany of imprisonments, beatings, suicides and shootings, deportations, along with lists of rules for hiding, reports of daring acts of resistance.
Often, the stories conclude with another Jewish resident being shipped to the Westerbork transit camp and murdered in the killing centres of Auschwitz and Sobibor in occupied Poland. If the description is of a building, the account often ends in a single word: “Demolished.”
The film offers no historical context, but the murder rate of Jews in the Netherlands was significantly higher than in other Western European countries such as France or Belgium, in part because of the cooperation of the Dutch municipal police, railway workers, and the Dutch Nazi party.
Occupied City is designed not so much to provoke emotions as to challenge our capacity for paying attention (“It’s okay to drift in and out,” recommends McQueen in the film’s production notes.) When we focus, we’re compelled to connect the double strand of the narrated past history and contemporary images in front of our eyes.
An outdoor café fills the screen as we hear about the winter famine of 1944-45. We see the site of a Jewish prison yard where inmates were forced to chant self-hating slogans, opposite a Hard Rock Café. Contemporary musicians play at a square where the Nazis set up a bandstand to play marching tunes.
Shot partly during the COVID pandemic, we see seniors lining up for COVID shots at a former deportation centre. The pandemic’s curfew is evoked as the camera glides through the darkened streets at night. In schools, museums, hospitals and train stations, an entire city infrastructure is transformed into an apparatus of surveillance and mass murder.
McQueen is not, unlike some anti-vax fanatic, equating quarantine COVID restrictions with a Nazi occupation. Rather, it’s inevitable that the city under lockdown carries a sense of dread, an echo of the past and an occasion for introspection.
Just as inevitably, we look to the rise of today’s political fanaticism and wonder: It couldn’t happen in a place like this, could it?
Occupied City. Directed by Steve McQueen. Based on the writings of Bianca Stigter. Narrated by Melanie Hyams. In theatres at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox and Halifax’s Carbon Arc Cinema April 26. Montreal and Vancouver dates to be announced.