Occupied City (2023)

***/****
based on the book by Bianca Stigter
directed by Steve McQueen

Now playing in Toronto at TIFF Bell Lightbox.

by Angelo Muredda Late in Steve McQueen’s Occupied City, the filmmaker’s elliptical, 4.5-hour nonfiction adaptation of co-screenwriter and partner Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945, a speaker at a commemoration for the victims of the Atlantic slave trade looks out into the audience at the Oosterpark and asks, “How do we create room for each other?” The site of that event, disembodied narrator Melanie Hyams tells us, was the storage yard for the occupying Nazi army’s vehicle fleet in the later days of the war, with German soldiers shooting at anyone who dared to steal stockpiled wooden blocks for use in their stoves. McQueen’s project in adapting such a sprawling, non-narrative text about the city he sometimes lives in is similarly anchored in the work of making room–not just for the myriad kinds of people who have lived and died there in the past 80 years, especially during the Second World War, but for the past and present as well.

Those two time frames tentatively overlap via McQueen’s juxtapositions of Stigter’s short archival narratives of historical atrocities indexed to specific addresses in the city and his own tender, formally restrained 35mm observations of those spaces in their present condition, starting in the pandemic lockdowns of spring 2020 and ending sometime in 2022. The connections between the historical text and McQueen’s contemporary footage–initially minimalist as he observes vignettes of life in parks and tobogganing hills but increasingly prone to the muscular tracking shots of Shame–range from the poignant to the opaque, though even in the most obscure links there’s often a prickly tension between the images and the text. Rather than reading the script in the traditional sombre tones of educational Holocaust documentaries, Hyams’s narration, translated into English from the original Dutch text, is spoken in a laconic, quizzical tone, as if the unnamed speaker is a weary time traveller traipsing through the archives and taking in the devastating biographical details of the lives she’s memorializing just before we are. The accumulating impression of Amsterdam is of a city moving forward on parallel tracks, with the narration capturing the inexorable creep of fascism that extinguishes Jewish and Dutch resistance culture, freedom, and finally life itself as the present-day footage ambles through lockdowns, lockdown protests, and a return to social life.

Where Stigter’s book charts an alphabetical course through more than 2,000 historical sites in the present, McQueen’s adaptation narrows it down to 130, organized instead by subtle thematic movements. The film opens with stark contrasts between quotidian life in currently occupied apartments and devastating stories of Jewish families in those same spaces on the eve of the Dutch surrender, soon to be betrayed by their colleagues, neighbours, and institutions, hidden by hosts benevolent and exploitative, killed in concentration camps, or found dead by suicide ahead of their deportation. McQueen bookends these helpless stories with a utopian glimpse of a biracial boy’s Bar Mitzvah, suggesting continuity and renewal in spite of the stark figure, announced towards the end, that more than 60,000 of Amsterdam’s 80,000 Jewish citizens were killed during the Holocaust. Between these polls, he surveys a range of disparate subjects and communities. He looks at a variety of artistic and intellectual institutions like museums, theatres, and universities, many of them demolished (as the narrator repeats throughout with a downbeat finality), but some still standing and haunted by the spectres of Jewish artists, scholars, and teachers purged from their ranks–and in some cases the historical record. Later, he retraces the grounds of furtive rebellions, looking at how public spaces like the aforementioned park, which have sometimes played host to scenes of horror and mass violence, are now home to any number of protests, from climate activism to Palestinian solidarity demonstrations, as well as young people milling about on benches rolling joints on their way out of COVID restrictions.

McQueen has likened the viewer’s progress through the film to a stroll in an eighteenth-century English garden, where, as he told The Guardian, “you are able to meander and get lost and be found again and go back on yourself.” Although the runtime lends itself to that digressive shape, a clearer sense of the city’s geography would certainly help tighten the slack of the loose structure, which is perhaps better suited for a video art installation than a film. Some of McQueen’s meanderings are more affecting than others, like a surreal lockdown-era tour of a restaurant where teddy bears holding a placard announcing “We are here for your safety” conspicuously occupy seats at every table to model social distancing. While they fill the empty dining hall, the narrator tells us the gloomy history of the hotel, a resistance-run guest house for Jewish refugees whose owners and tenants were later arrested and executed–their belongings then posthumously appropriated to furnish its relaunch as a German guest house under Nazi control.

Though there’s a beguiling strangeness to that pairing of past and present and others like it, a later moment that yokes the Nazi occupation together with a violent police liquidation of an anti-lockdown protest is merely muddled. Does McQueen view these public health protesters as part of a rich history of Dutch resistance to fascism? Or does he lay one protest atop the other to emphasize the parodic distance between laying your body on the line for your neighbours during the war and refusing to care for your fellow citizens during the pandemic? Neither the film nor its filmmaker is obliged to say, of course, and the famously blunt McQueen has bristled at the suggestion that the comparison means anything more than the existence of these events occupying the same basic space at different times. It’s fair enough to leave the meaning-making of montage to critics, yet when the dominant formal conceit is the holding together of contrasting ideas and images, one expects something more coherent–or at least interesting–to come out of that tension.

The deeper structural vulnerability to Occupied City, however, is that for all its efforts to keep both yesterday and today alive and in dialogue through sound and image, much of which is absorbing and successful, the contemporary Amsterdam it depicts already feels vacuum-sealed and museum-ready. The film’s portraits of urban social life rebounding after COVID simultaneously read as corny for the majority who have not thought of the pandemic in years and vapid for the much smaller minority who are still COVID-conscious. And the late overtures towards youth involvement in climate protests and other contemporary social movements feel quaint in the face of not only the Dutch resistance but the worldwide protest movements that have taken root since the film’s world premiere at Cannes in 2023. McQueen’s vision of Amsterdam is a capacious one that makes room for any number of people and spaces, making the documentary feel more like a stroll through a town square than an English garden. But in the end, that roominess also feels like a reluctance to put things in their proper place.