Steve McQueen’s monumental film is a vast survey-meditation on the wartime history and psychogeography of his adopted city: Amsterdam, based on his wife Bianca Stigter’s Dutch-language book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945.
With a calm and undemonstrative narrative voiceover from Melanie Hyams, the film tracks day-to-day life in Amsterdam under Nazi rule. It spans the invasion in 1940; the establishment of the NSB, the collaborationist Dutch Nazi party; the increasingly brutal repression and deportation of Jewish populations to the death camps; and then the “hunger winter” of 1944 to 1945 as food and fuel became scarce in the city and the Nazis displayed a gruesome mix of panic and fanaticism as the allies closed in.
What McQueen does is effectively represent the maps and figure legends of the book on screen: the camera shows us the modern-day indoor and outdoor scenes on individual streets, canals, squares, buildings and jetties where the barbarity unfolded – but shows them as they are now, with 21st-century people going about their business while Hyams’ narration coolly summarises what happened in each particular spot, sometimes adding that the original building has been “demolished”. A prison yard where Jews were forced to parade around chanting: “I am a Jew, beat me to death, it’s my own fault” is now an open space overlooked by the Hard Rock Cafe. The headquarters of the secret police was on the site of what is now a school.
Occupied City lasts a little more than four hours, with an intermission, and the effect is something like an huge cinematic frieze or tapestry, or perhaps an installation. But it is also like an old fashioned “city symphony” movie, and, in its approach, perhaps bears the influence of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. It asks hard questions of what we think about the gulf between past and present. When we think about Nazi rule in Amsterdam, we think of … what? Flickering black-and-white newsreel footage, semi-familiar landmarks in monochrome, images of swastikas, an alien display of history, vacuum-sealed in the past. But McQueen shows us the modern world, in 4K resolution and there is a gradual realisation that for those involved in 1940, the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam happened just like this: in living colour in the here-and-now, with modern hairstyles and clothes.
Sometimes there is a disconnect between past and present. The site of a bygone horror might in 2023 be a scene of happiness: people ice-skating on a frozen canal and having innocent fun. At some other place we see a commemorative event: the laying of wreaths. At other times, there will be a parallel: in Dam Square the Nazi occupiers erected a bandstand; now we see a stage for outdoor performance. And then there are other, serious engagements with history and politics. We see an official statement of apology for colonialism and slavery; we see a huge and boisterous “climate strike” by young people and an event for the murdered Dutch investigative journalist Peter R de Vries. The effect is to show us that the past and present are not clear, with distinct layers of old/significant and new/insignificant: it is more fluid than that.
Occasionally, there is a weird frisson. Some of McQueen’s footage was shot during the Covid lockdown and the juxtaposition of this with Nazi oppression takes us – unintentionally – perhaps a little close to GB News territory. And audiences might be surprised at how little emphasis is placed on Anne Frank: it could well be that McQueen wanted to take us away from well-trodden arguments, and certainly to move away from the modern tourist cliches of coffee shops and sex worker windows. Although on that last point there is another eerie historical echo in the way in which sexual activity between occupier and occupied was variously policed, tolerated and punished.
In its scale and seriousness, Occupied City allows its emotional implication to amass over its running time. The effect is mysterious and moving.
• Occupied City screened at the Cannes film festival.
