By JOÃO LANARI BO*
Commentary on the documentary by artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen
Occupied City It is one of those projects that proposes a concrete challenge to the viewer: it is almost 4 and a half hours long, in a narrative (the word is insufficient) that neither advances nor retreats, does not move from one place, but is constantly in motion. Time: a category that is at once (once again) philosophical and material, historical and physical.
Based on the book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945, by filmmaker and historian Bianca Stigter (the director's partner), the film recovers everyday life in Amsterdam under Nazi rule, from the invasion in 1940 until the liberation in 1945 – and it does so by revisiting hundreds of addresses in the present of the 21st century, referring to the past with dry and objective entries of the tragedies that, for some reason, refer to those spaces.
The contemporary images – captured in 35mm, 4:3 format, a classic cinema aspect ratio – have an aesthetic similar to that of urban documentaries from the 20s and 30s, poetic and attentive to the details of the diversity of human presence. The addresses bring back memories of the brutal repression and deportation of Jewish populations to concentration camps: but they also evoke courageous actions by the local resistance, Jews and non-Jews alike, as well as the betrayals of those who did not hesitate to sacrifice those close to them in the fight for survival.
There was the oppressive power of the occupying Germans, and there were also the collaborators – who even formed a Dutch Nazi party, the NSB. In late 1944, things got tough: food and fuel became scarce, the Allied forces were approaching, and the Nazis descended into behavior that alternated between fanaticism and panic. The period became known as the “Hunger Winter”. Occupied City is, in this light, pure horror.
Steve McQueen directed a huge variety of shorts, some associated with the artistic installations that performs. Entered the mainstream of feature films with Hunger, in 2008, and reached the top of the activity with the award-winning 12 years of slavery, winner of the 2014 Oscar – in one of those years when the Academy chose to recognize films with social and political content. Michael Fassbender, an excellent actor, participated in some of these achievements.
Steve McQueen pursues a parallel career as an artist, equally (or more) intense, focused on the production of ambitious and conceptually complex multimedia installations (an insufficient word), which are restricted to museums, galleries and prestigious cultural institutions. Among other foundations, they are, to put it simply, investigations into the inherent possibilities of audiovisual media – which functions as a material in itself, a documentary tool, or an instrument for telling stories. Moving between these two systems, mass entertainment (cinema) and visual speculation (art) is his drive. It's no small thing.
Occupied City is located at the crossroads of these two worlds. It is a film that could be shown in an exhibition, one or more screens, spectators coming and going, watching one or more fragments – like someone opening a dictionary and reading two or three entries. But the filmmaker (this time) chose to make the cinema his place, to generate a sense of continuity, a single session, beginning and end (intermission included). If it is in streaming, the viewer can divide the 4 and a half hours however he or she wishes. What matters, to enjoy this language, is immersion – the conjunction of image (present) and text (past).
Filming began shortly before the Covid pandemic – which inevitably came into play – and took two years and a few months. The past/present dissonance of Occupied City is moving and impactful. One scene shows a family in their apartment today, in banal moments of leisure or work: the narrator, the young Melanie Hyams, describes how that apartment belonged to a Jewish family deported to a concentration camp and murdered.
Then, a city square that was once used for executions of resistance fighters and fascist demonstrations is now the site of environmental protests. Empty streets, Holocaust-related ceremonies, Zoom weddings, anti-vaccine protests and children sledding in snowy parks – coexist with descriptions of atrocities and deaths.
For Walter Benjamin, “history is the object of a construction whose place is not homogeneous and empty time, but a time saturated with agoras.” The quote was obtained with two clicks, plus one now. In McQueen’s film, the story told in the narration is constantly folding in on itself, as if the past were trapped somewhere in this ethereal world that surrounds us.
*João Lanari Bo He is a professor of cinema at the Faculty of Communication at the University of Brasília (UnB). Author, among other books, of Cinema for Russians, Cinema for Soviets (Time Bazaar) [https://amzn.to/45rHa9F]
Reference
Occupied City
United States, England, Netherlands, 2022, documentary, 266 minutes.
Directed by: Steve McQueen.
Cast: Melanie Hyams.
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