Past and Present Intersect in Steve McQueen’s “Occupied City”

NAB

Occupied City is the second recent feature film following The Zone of Interest to address the holocaust without resorting to over used imagery. This four hour feature documentary by British director Steve McQueen concerns the Nazi Occupation of Amsterdam during World War II but doesn’t use archive footage, talking heads, or dramatize any scenes.

article here

It is based on Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945, a historical encyclopedia written by McQueen's wife, the historian and filmmaker Bianca Stigter.

“Bianca had written this extraordinary book, and it's all her research over the last 20 years or more," explained the director to Aframe. "It's not the first book you'd ever think we'd translate into a movie. It's not an obvious choice."

Using the text of Atlas as narration, McQueen (who won Best Picture with 2013's 12 Years a Slave) juxtaposes the history of the city and explanatory narration by Melanie Hyams with footage of life in Amsterdam today, which he shot over the course of over several beginning in 2019 and through the pandemic lockdowns. 

“What I wanted was, as you would do in a city, you get lost,” McQueen told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, adding that the film was a bit like an English garden. “Unlike a French garden, which is all about the avenues; it’s very symmetrical, very formal. An English garden [has] more to do with wandering and the contemplating and lots of ideas come from those places of wandering and pondering.” 

Stigter describes the film is more of a free wandering through the city, and the book is more practically set up like a guide book.

One scene in which the elderly owner of an apartment in which Occupied City filmed showed the crew country line-dancing. Under Hyams’ narration of what happened there during the war, the joyful dancing of the owner adds the fact that she, also, might have her own story of the Nazi occupation. 

“There’s something excessive about the movie because — besides from what you see, you also think, ‘What do these people [we’re seeing] have in their heads [from that time]?’” Stigter told IndieWire.  

McQueen, who lives in Amsterdam with his Dutch wife, found the experience of living in a city that had once been Nazi occupied an unsettling one.

“My daughter's school was once an interrogation center. Where my son went to school was a Jewish school, so these things were in my every day,” he told Aframe. “When it's sinking into your pores, you start thinking about it. Coming from London, not having grown up in an occupied city but being here now, it felt like I was living with ghosts. It's almost like an archaeological dig. This is recent history within the last 85 or 90 years, and I thought this could be fascinating. It is two existences: My presence and another presence.”

Initially, McQueen thought he’d find some archive footage from Amsterdam in WWII to project on top of the present day footage, but then decided to use narration based on Stigter’s text and to merge the two things together.

“There's optimism in [Hyams’] voice, even though there was a dispassionate sort of description of what was going on,” he told NPR's Asma Khalid. “And that was because I didn't want to manipulate the audience. It was about the audience bringing the information, receiving the information for the first time.”

He described the process of shooting on 35mm – his favoured medium – as a ritual. “It's so precious this footage and it actually adds to the tension of being careful about how you how you approach the moment,” he told the New York Film Festival.

“It was shooting without a tightrope, in a way,” he added to Aframe. “Young people today shoot digitally; they spray the whole area, shooting for 60 hours and cutting it down to half an hour. You can't do that with film. The process of making a film and working with Lennert Hillege, the DP, the sound people, and others, it was a beautiful ritual every time we took the camera. I think that was extremely helpful in capturing things, because everyone was very focused.”

Addressing the length of the film, McQueen said it couldn't be told in an hour and a half. “It needed that contemplation, needed meditations to sort of get into the psyche of the cinema experience, and that time was very important for us,” he told NPR.

Stigter said, "It's essential to have ways to bring history to the fore. We have documentaries, books, and feature films, and this is trying to tell you things about the past in a different way. That's also why the length is important. It turns it more into a meditation or an experience than a history lesson."

McQueen, who began his career making video installation art, is also preparing a “36-hour sculptural version” as an art piece. “There are 36 hours of edited footage,” he informed Aframe. “From that 36 hours of edited footage, we took out these four hours, because making a feature film is a very different experience than making the sculptural element of it. Certain things are repeated in that, but you don't want to do that in a feature film. In some ways, after a particular moment, it condenses itself, and then you decide what you want to keep in and what you want to take out to make it a certain kind of journey.”

Occupied City ends with a bar mitzvah ceremony because it was important to McQueen and Stigter to show the persistence of Jewish life in Amsterdam.

In a presentation at the New York Film Festival Stigter said, “For me the last scene is also very important to show something of contemporary Jewish life in the city, and that was a very beautiful and hopeful conclusion for the for the movie.

“I often think watching a movie is like a religious experience,” McQueen added to Aframe. “You're trying to create meaning in what you see. In this case, the more you know, the less you know.”

He continued this theme with NPR, saying, “When you go to the movies, people try to connect the dots and try to make sense of things. But the lessons learned from this situation is that nothing makes sense. How can you even fathom or sort of get to an understanding of how, for example during this war, 6 million people died. Try and make sense of that.