From the humble street corners to the grand hotels, from the bridges over the Amstel canal to the tram stops near the Rijksmuseum, wherever you go in Amsterdam there is a story from the city’s years of Nazi occupation. This spot is where the first “No Jews Allowed” sign was posted. Over there is where the RAF mistakenly dropped a bomb. And here’s where the attack on the civil registry office was plotted.
“It’s a lot of stories,” agrees historian and film-maker Bianca Stigter, as we walk the streets, together with her husband Steve McQueen, taking in key locations from their new film, Occupied City. The sheer number of stories here – of tragedy, treachery, desolation – is overwhelming and yet, says Stigter, there is something sadder still: “What affected me most was when I couldn’t find any information about someone to make it a story. You could only find that someone was born and someone was murdered, and that was it.”
Occupied City took two decades of meticulous research that Stigter conducted into the people and places of her home city from 1940 to 1945. In 2019, she published this as a book, Atlas of an Occupied City. It is now a documentary too, although the term hardly does justice to this four-hour, immersive, audiovisual time-travel experience. McQueen likes to compare the results of their collaboration to an 18th-century English garden, “where you are able to meander and get lost and be found again and go back on yourself”.
This isn’t the first time the couple have worked together. Indeed, it was Stigter who landed on the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup, which would eventually become McQueen’s 2013 Oscar-winner 12 Years a Slave. She was associate producer on that film, as well as on McQueen’s 2018 heist thriller Widows, while McQueen co-produced her 2022 directorial debut, the Holocaust documentary Three Minutes: A Lengthening. Some bickering over our route notwithstanding, it’s clear that theirs is an easygoing, intuitive collaboration that arises naturally from their life together. “We’re always talking about his work, my work, the work together,” says Stigter with a smile.
Of all the Stigter-McQueen collaborations, this one is – literally – closest to home. “This project is rolling out of bed and into my everyday,” says 54-year-old McQueen, who was born in London but has been based in Amsterdam “on and off” since meeting Stigter 28 years ago. “The original idea was to find some footage from 1940 and then trace it over the exact same sort of footage from now.” That would be possible, he says, because “Amsterdam wasn’t bombed like Rotterdam was”. This means its buildings, which largely date from the 17th-century, more or less endure. “So to trace two sets of images would reinforce the lines of the buildings – and have living and dead in the same frame.” This was a good idea but it was soon superseded by a better one: “I thought, ‘What happens if the images of the past were text – like the whisper of the wind – and I just have to shoot the present day?”
And this is the deceptively simple means by which Occupied City achieves its transcendent power. It combines McQueen’s footage – every one of the 2,000-plus addresses in Stigter’s atlas were shot, although not all made the final cut – with a voiceover by Melanie Hyams, a young British-Jewish actor, who reads out descriptions of each place during the occupation, who lived there, what they did.
Gerrit van der Veen College, for example, is both the school McQueen and Stigter’s daughter once attended and the former HQ of the Sicherheitspolizei, or German security police, the brutal enforcers of the Nazis’ occupation regime. This morning the school is alive with the sounds of ringing bells and rushing teenagers, but during the war, says Stigter, this was “the most feared address in the whole of Amsterdam”.
After seeking permission to enter, Stigter, who is 59, guides us through a locker-lined corridor to classrooms that were once cells where prisoners awaited interrogation and torture. Today, in one of these classrooms, a history lesson is under way. The words “Hitler’s Ideeen” – meaning “Hitler’s Ideology” – are written on the whiteboard. A few doors down, pupils are watching a scene from The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, a 2008 Holocaust film that has been both championed as a useful educational resource, and criticised for soft-pedalling the culpability of ordinary Germans.
Occupied City contains no such dramatisations, let alone any straightforward didacticism. But its inclusion of certain events – an anti-fascist protest in the wake of far-right electoral successes, and the recent replacement of the outdated Monument of Jewish Gratitude with the National Holocaust Names Memorial – do invite reflection. How and when should we remember the darkest times? What does it mean to truly honour the dead?
Amsterdam’s efforts at memorials include the Stolpersteine, meaning stumbling stones or blocks, one of which Stigter points out during our walk. These are 10cm square brass plaques, laid in the pavement and each inscribed with the name of a Nazi victim and the dates of their birth and death. The scheme was conceived by German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992, but stolpersteine can now be found across mainland Europe. Stigter approves, but has some reservations: “You can put up a lot of monuments, but they become like trees, because people just pass them by without really realising what they are for.”
With Occupied City, McQueen has created a strikingly different way of reconnecting with the past. He talks of “sprinkling flour over this invisible history to make it visible”, and says watching the film is like being at a classical concert: “Because you can’t hold all of it in your head all the time. It’s just too much. Therefore you do drift off and come back in – one projects one’s own history into it.”
The results illuminate the events of the past to a near-hallucinatory degree. Three hours in, you’ll be seeing long-dead heroes of the Dutch resistance once again weaving in between unsuspecting shoppers on Kalverstraat; or keep-fit enthusiasts in Beatrixpark shadowboxing for exercise and in order to fend off uniformed officers of the Nederlandsche SS.
This, says Stigter, is to do with the brain’s habit of filling in gaps. “The relationship between what you hear and see is not fixed. It changes all the time. Sometimes there’s a very obvious connection, but sometimes there is no direct link.” In drawing our attention to this disconnect, says McQueen, Occupied City highlights a profound absence of meaning. “As you watch a movie, you’re always looking to making sense of it. And sometimes, as with our film, it just doesn’t make sense. How do you make sense of 6 million people being murdered? It’s impossible.”
This question became a practical problem for McQueen, faced with the overwhelming task of editing hours and hours of footage: “It was a lot,” says the film-maker, who decided to start at “the deepest, darkest moment” and then “work out to a certain kind of light”. That initial darkest period he identified as the weeks following the Dutch surrender on 14 May 1940, when a wave of suicides spread across the nation, among them entire families choosing death over life under the Nazis. “It’s a point of darkness where there’s no future. I mean what is that point? It’s a non-point. You’re so without hope that there’s no future for you or your children or anything to do with you.”
Yet Occupied City does find its way back to hope, light and even frivolity — albeit not in any kind of linear-narrative fashion. “It wasn’t a case of dispersing moments of triumph,” says McQueen, looking slightly insulted by the suggestion. “It wasn’t a Hollywood movie. It was just basically living with things as they are, as they have to be.”
This mood derives in part from a quality the filmmakers sought in the narration. “Melanie’s voice,” says McQueen, “is, in a way, an optimistic voice – because she’s not of that period, she’s of now. She has a stake in the future. It’s not a history lesson: she’s maybe one step ahead of you, but that’s it. Just as she’s saying it, she’s acknowledging it herself. Very important.” Scenes of everyday life in the city today also helped. “When I was going around filming,” says McQueen, “it was heavy to think, ‘Oh, this person was shot here, and there’s kids playing hopscotch where a person lay dead.’ It’s very sobering. But it also just tells me what was fought for to get us to this moment, where a child can hopscotch, where people can protest, where people can –”
“– have a bar mitzvah,” says Stigter. “Yes, have a bar mitzvah,” McQueen agrees. They are perhaps thinking of the final, glorious shot of Occupied City in which children – friends of the couple’s son, in fact – joyously spill out of the golden doors of a synagogue.
This is the layered meaning of the film’s title. As well as having once been occupied by an invading army, and now by ghosts of the past, the city – like all modern cities – is occupied in the sense of preoccupied. It’s a breathing, bustling, ever-changing place, where people are sometimes too busy living to think of the dead.
As much as Occupied City is an act of remembering, it also finds something to cherish in Amsterdam’s ability to forget. “I love the fact that these kids don’t give a damn,” says McQueen, “and why should they? They can roll up and smoke their spliff and bunk off school, like we saw outside that school. It’s always the girls, innit? It’s always the girls smoking! And they have a right to do so. So yeah, to be oblivious can also be an act of protest.”
• Occupied City is released in the UK on 9 February. A special event, screening at the Barbican in London, will take place on 11 February, including a Q&A with McQueen and Stigter that will be broadcast live to cinemas nationwide.
