18/05/2023 - CANNES 2023: Steve McQueen surveils his adopted home city of Amsterdam over the last years of pandemic and protest, and finds remnants of its wartime experience lying in wait

Both dense and minimal, stark yet generous, Occupied City [+see also:
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film profile] finds Steve McQueen coming home in multiple respects: to the city where he’s resided for 27 years, heretofore not a source of inspiration for his work; and to the imposingly rigorous art pieces for which he originally gained attention. His partner Bianca Stigter, recently acclaimed as a filmmaker for Three Minutes – A Lengthening [+see also:
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interview: Bianca Stigter
film profile], supplies his chief inspiration with her scholarly tome Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945. Yet the fascinating question here is whether McQueen is truly honouring that history: whilst its prominent voice-over by Melanie Hyams recounts innumerable past atrocities, its vast visual frame of reference never forsakes the present tense. It has premiered as a Special Screening at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where his film career was launched in 2008 with a Caméra d’Or for Hunger [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Laura Hastings-Smith Rob…
interview: Steve McQueen
film profile].

The guiding structure is simple and spare, but lets countless layers of detail arise. The majority of sequences in this 262-minute film affix themselves to one location within the city limits of Amsterdam; then, Hyams will identify it by its current but more often former premises, narrating in a steady but engaging monotone its relationship to the persecution of the Jews during the occupation, or the considerable Resistance efforts. Roughly half of these narrational fragments end with Hyams cooly saying, “Demolished,” gesturing to the new architecture constructed in its place. A fissure is created by the eschewal of archival material, interviews or exposition; we audibly absorb the past, but exclusively view observationally captured shots of the city now – the canals, the glass towers and, yes, a bit of the red-light district.

To use a very “art theory” term, Occupied City is entirely material: the imagery and shots generate the considerable content, and as nothing seems to especially evoke the circumstances and wider context of how the Nazis gradually occupied this and other countries, there’s no need to over-explicate it. For two Gentile artists, the emphasis on Jewish life is quite startling, yet never sentimentalised. Anne Frank is sometimes referred to, but instead, there’s a panoply of stories and experiences of the most humiliating persecution and oppression. In this age of recurrent antisemitism, it’s an obvious but necessary reminder that 20^th-century Europe was once a home for the Jews, but not now.

McQueen is sensitive enough to the wider context of this solidarity to the community. At demonstrations in the city centre, such as one in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, we see insignia of Palestinian support. And instances of collaboration, particularly through the Jewish Council community representatives, are baldly unveiled.

The majesty and diversity of this urban landscape still overcomes these reminders of trauma. The pandemic was perhaps the biggest disruption and cessation of everyday life since World War II, and that comparison is subtly invoked here, especially in bravely ambivalent sequences where COVID deniers – who infamously have compared themselves to persecuted Jews – stage an anti-lockdown protest. But there are sugar-rush sequences leading out of this mire, with the first round of vaccine uptake by vulnerable older people set to Bowie’s classic “Golden Years”. Then there are black teens guerrilla-shooting a Dutch-language “mumble-rap” music video near social housing, and a Halloween party set to house beats, with an attendee dressed as an intricate COVID spore. With the film’s entire trajectory in mind, McQueen always sharply cuts between shots in his editing, but its effect in the mind is like an eternal crossfade, or lap dissolve, between two stark historical points.

Occupied City is a co-production by the UK, the Netherlands and the USA, staged by New Regency, A24, Film4, Lammas Park and Family Affair Films. A24 also holds the world sales rights.