Occupied City: Steve McQueen continues his impressive run depicting the burden of history on the present

Steve McQueen’s film is based on a systematic documenting of every address in Amsterdam mentioned in his partner Bianca Stigter’s book, Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945 (2019). These are places of atrocity and resistance, complicity and defiance, memory and forgetting: all the moral complexities of being under occupation. From 2,000 sites filmed in 36 hours of footage, McQueen edited a version for cinematic release that runs more than four hours long. It is shaped as a film, but this may not be the material’s only or final form.

While the book is structured by district, street and address, the film is more haphazard. Camera styles are mixed: a distant, pitiless stare; hand-held tracking among children sledging in snow, or protesting crowds; hitching a ride on a tram; occasional liberatory swooshing drone-glides through empty night-time streets. McQueen used 35mm film to commit to the danger (and expense!) of the moment of filming, and the aspect ratio is portrait, not landscape. It is a fine addition to the ‘city symphony’ genre as much as an act of remembrance against modernity’s will to forget its own difficult history.

The film is a hybrid that has echoes ranging from Patrick Keiller’s London (1994) to Susan Hiller’s J. Street Project (her 2009 photographic and video record of every surviving Judenstrasse in Germany). Shot across the years 2020-22, Occupied City may also prove to be one of the great records of how Covid transformed city spaces and foregrounded the politics of urban assembly.

The image is always contemporary Amsterdam. Like Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), it includes no archive footage from the war. The dense voiceover, read in neutral tones by Melanie Hyams, calmly records the events that took place at each address: executions, suicides, deportations, resistance, subversion, acts of defiance. The summary of events at some addresses ends with the abrupt word ‘demolished’. This memorialises what has been completely erased, and makes the viewer cherish all the more those sites in the city that have survived. This sound/image decision is the reverse of Stigter’s own documentary Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2022), which stays solely with archive footage, manipulated, slowed down, stopped, rerun again and again, against a soundtrack of commentary from unseen figures. The films make a striking pair.

Throughout the epic duration of Occupied City, juxtapositions of sound and image at each site, their convergence and divergence, hold your attention. McQueen has said on the festival circuit that one impetus for the film was learning that his daughter’s school in Amsterdam had been the site of an SS interrogation centre, his son’s school a prison. How does a city survive the weight of this history? Some places have become memorials – the Hollandsche Schouwburg theatre, which served as a deportation centre for Jews from 1941-44, became a museum in 1962, and the camera moves slowly over the list of 6,700 surnames of deported families that was installed there in 1992. At other sites, where the public humiliation and murder of Jews took place, bland shopping malls now stand. Where the Nazis looted Jewish businesses with impunity, outlets for Tesla or Prada are seen boarded up for lockdown.

It is the nature of public space that produces the most compelling juxtapositions. There are ceremonial events for King’s Day, and a giant booze-up on the streets that defies all lockdown rules. There are military commemorations of liberation in May 1945: victories are easier to remember than defeats. McQueen records the socially distanced official ceremonies offering formal apologies for Amsterdam’s role in slavery in the Dutch East Indies. There are also street protests – in squares where the Dutch Nazi Party once displayed their power, the police move in on anti-vaxx protesters. There is a section recording a large environmental protest moving through the main streets of the city, which implies hope for a new commitment to the future against a darker past. But there is also footage of the formal events following the shocking murder of the investigative journalist Peter de Vries in July 2021, assassinated as he left a TV studio in the city.

Watching Occupied City after the Dutch elections of 22 November 2023, when the far-right politician Geert Wilders gained the largest share of the votes, makes the film a necessary record of the imperative to remember the actual consequences of fascist rule. Alongside McQueen’s blistering documentation in Grenfell (2023) of the brutal mix of atrocity and erasure around the deaths of 72 people in a tower block fire in London, Occupied City continues the director’s impressive run of engagements with the burden of history on the present.

► In UK cinemas from 9 February