Friday 9 February sees the UK release of Occupied City, a four-hour-plus documentary by the British director Steve McQueen, who in 2014 became the first Black film-maker to win an Oscar for best picture. As director and producer of 12 Years a Slave, McQueen (who was knighted in 2020) established himself as a pioneer of modern cinema. Yet as he demonstrates with Occupied City, which juxtaposes chillingly factual narration about Nazi atrocities in German-occupied Amsterdam with modern-day images of the city, he has never turned his back on his roots in visual art. Indeed, McQueen’s latest, based on his partner/co-producer Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945, owes as much to the traditions of provocative video installations as to narrative drama.
I first met McQueen in 2008, after he won the Cannes Caméra d’Or for his debut feature film, Hunger. I asked whether he considered himself primarily an artist who made films, or a film-maker who made art. My question was prompted by the fact that, long before the film accolades started rolling in, McQueen, who has made his home in London and Amsterdam, was a Turner prize-winning artist, beating media darling Tracey Emin to the award back in 1999. “I don’t see myself as anything,” McQueen replied. “I just do stuff. It’s all the same to me – art or film. I don’t see any difference, or any divide.”
