Remembering and forgetting — address by address
In Steve McQueen's Occupied City, a woman with an even voice narrates, with specificity, Nazi encounters and crimes throughout Amsterdam during the Second World War. The accounts go address by address, and so does McQueen's camera.
Yet the images that play in Occupied City are of modern-day Amsterdam. In the four-hour-plus documentary made by McQueen, the 12 Years a Slave director, with his partner, the Dutch documentarian and author Bianca Stigter, past and present are fused — or at least provocatively juxtaposed.
The effect can be startling, stirring and confounding. An elderly woman shifts to country music in an apartment complex where, we're told, a family was once arrested and sent to a concentration camp. A radio throbs with Bob Marley near where a German officer once resided. A boy plays a virtual reality video game where an execution took place.
“It's almost like once upon a time there was this place called Earth,” McQueen said in an interview alongside Stigter.
Occupied City, which premièred Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival, includes no archival footage or talking heads. Instead, it invites the viewer to consider the distance between one of history's darkest chapters and now. It's about remembering and forgetting.
“You want to wake people up and at the same time take them with you,” says McQueen, a British expat who has made Amsterdam his adoptive home with Stigter and their children.
The film is rooted in Stigter's illustrated book Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945), which likewise catalogued the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam and the methodical murdering of its Jewish citizens. Stigter and McQueen have researched their own address. A few doors down, McQueen says, a Jewish man in hiding paid for his keep by teaching a family's child how to play piano. Their lessons were conducted quietly by tapping on the table.
Occupied City details how the Nazi occupation unfolded, door to door, name by name. At the same time, it can be hard to reconcile those accounts with the accompanying footage that captures mostly civic harmony throughout modern Amsterdam. Though Occupied City, which A24 financed and is distributing, touches on monuments and museums to the Holocaust, its imagery mostly lingers on the thriving life of a city. Life moves along, relentlessly.
“The present erases history,” says McQueen. “There's going to be a time when no one is going to be around who knew certain people. It kind of echoes what's happening with the Second World War. There's not a lot of people around who can testify about what actually went on in that time. They're all passed. This film in some ways is erecting those memories in another way.”
McQueen is now in post-production on a more traditional film about the Second World War set in London: Blitz, for Apple, starring Saoirse Ronan. Though in many ways McQueen is among the most fiercely contemporary filmmakers working, history has animated much of his work. 12 Years a Slave plunged into slavery-era America. His five-film anthology Small Axe spanned generations of West Indian immigrant life in London. He has dramatized the Irish hunger strike of 1981 (Hunger) and, most recently, the Grenfell Tower tragedy (Grenfell), in which 72 died.
“I feel recording is very important. Witnessing is very important. Not looking away is very important,” he says. “The thing about cinema that's powerful is an audience and a community witnessing something together. There's nothing more special, there's nothing more powerful than to have this kind of communal witness to something.”
Stigter considers Occupied City not a history lesson but “an experience.” She says: “Your brain is programmed to match, to put together what you hear and what you see. Here, sometimes it's hard to find that link. And sometimes you find it.”
The length of Occupied City, which is playing with an intermission, encourages rumination. Drifting between narration and imagery, McQueen says, is part of the experience. He would rather it was longer, if anything.
“There is a 36-hour version of this. We shot everything in the book. Maybe one day I'll get a chance to show that,” says McQueen. “The actual method of shooting was about that. You just have to let it happen.”
“The ordinary becomes extraordinary,” he adds. “As you get older, you realize it's the small things in life that are the treasures. There's a value. There's a value to sitting with a cup of tea with a biscuit. I'll have it any day.”