Occu­pied City review – a stag­ger­ing­ly ambi­tious feat of emo­tion­al stamina

Steve McQueen intro­duced the Cannes Spe­cial Screen­ing of his 4.5 hour Holo­caust doc­u­men­tary, say­ing: ​“It’s about what’s under your bed and on your doorstep.” The British artist-film­mak­er has lived in Ams­ter­dam for the past 27 years and it would seem as if the under­sides of his bed and the con­tents of his doorstep had piled up beyond rhyme or reason.

Adapt­ed from the book Atlas of an Occu­pied City: Ams­ter­dam 1940 – 1945 by Bian­ca Stigter, McQueen’s part­ner, this doc­u­men­tary serves more as an index of vio­lent death than any­thing approach­ing nar­ra­tive cin­e­ma. The inten­tion­al­ly jar­ring cen­tral con­cept is root­ed in a tem­po­ral and emo­tion­al dis­cord between the images pre­sent­ed and the nar­ra­tive on top of them.

McQueen shoots con­tem­po­rary Ams­ter­dam (dur­ing the pan­dem­ic) fre­quent­ly land­ing on fun or beau­ti­ful moments – dust motes float­ing in gold­en hour light, youths danc­ing to music as euphor­i­cal­ly as in Lovers Rock. All the while, a sweet robot­ic voice (Melanie Hyams) gives the full name and pot­ted sto­ry of some­one who was once bru­talised by the Nazis at the exact spot where this scene is unfolding.

[X] lived at [y] address on [z] floor and was mur­dered at the age 49. Or 22. Or 16. Or as a baby. [X] was tak­en to the tran­sit camp West­er­bork, then trans­ferred to Auschwitz and mur­dered. Or to Mau­tha­suen and then mur­dered. Or to Bunchen­wald and then mur­dered. With their moth­er. Or child. Or sib­ling. [X] was shot to death when the Order Police saw them out 2 min­utes after cur­few, or in a park where Jews weren’t allowed, or rid­ing a bicy­cle wear­ing a Red Cross uni­form draped with a Dutch flag.

In its most stag­ger­ing moments it seems like McQueen has mount­ed a memo­r­i­al for an entire city in which 80,000 Jew­ish res­i­dents shrank to 20,000. Amongst the sto­ries of sadis­tic vio­lence are sto­ries of resis­tance. Forged doc­u­ments, intre­pid escapes, demean­ing ordeals sur­vived. Some­times the footage from the present aspires to speak to the past in the form of protest songs and polit­i­cal ral­lies, while stu­pid joy­ous free­doms, like a teenage cou­ple lazi­ly caress­ing, seem sacred.

How­ev­er there are many, many moments when so many sto­ries have piled up on top of each oth­er that one is numb, dazed, dis­con­nect­ed from the mate­r­i­al. There has been a Her­culean lev­el of research in terms of respect­ing all the peo­ple men­tioned here by includ­ing the bare min­i­mum of their full name, mean­ing that there is a fleet­ing moment when the real­i­ty of who they once were holds the cen­tre your atten­tion, but they are almost instant­ly replaced by the next per­son and the next one and the next one.

There is an argu­ment to be made that the atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted dur­ing the Holo­caust defy com­pre­hen­sion and a sto­ry­teller seek­ing to relay some­thing of that expe­ri­ence need not be bound by con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive con­sid­er­a­tions. Occu­pied City is, in many ways, the oppo­site of McQueen’s recent 24-minute instal­la­tion film, Gren­fell, a memo­r­i­al forged out of space and silence, for there are stretch­es in Occu­pied City when we have been so bar­raged with vari­a­tions of the same sto­ry that grav­i­ty is lost and ter­ri­ble vital details form a unique­ly stress­ful mode of ambi­ent sound.

If his for­mal motives here are some­times obscure, McQueen’s sin­cer­i­ty is nev­er in ques­tion. Occu­pied City is a stag­ger­ing­ly ambi­tious feat of emo­tion­al sta­mi­na and in the unre­lent­ing litany of hor­ror sto­ries pre­sent­ed here, one thing is clear: he wants us to remem­ber some­thing, anything.

To that end: one thing I will remem­ber is the descrip­tion of two mid­dle-aged Jew­ish sis­ters who forged doc­u­ments so that it seemed like they were the prod­uct of an affair their moth­er had with a non-Jew­ish man. Nonethe­less, the sus­pi­cious occu­py­ing Nazis had them walk around with their skirts raised so that they could check if the women had ​“Jew­ish legs”. The sis­ters passed this absurd test and went on to help numer­ous oth­er Jew­ish peo­ple to survive.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, week­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.