2023-05-18 16:05:12
“In September 1940, the German occupation ordered that all windows had to be blacked out at night and all streetlights had to be turned off so that the city could not serve as a landmark for British planes. This resulted in 55 people drowning over the course of the war.”
In his documentary “Occupied City” Steve McQueen tells of the Second World War in Amsterdam, the city of canals. It’s a war story like you’ve probably never seen before. McQueen is not oriented to events, people or commemorations. It is based on addresses.
Like the German stumbling blocks
It’s like the system of stumbling blocks in Germany, only on film: the matter-of-fact voice of the photographer Melanie Hyams names an address, tells in a few words who lived there and what happened there during the war. Meanwhile, McQueen’s camera shows the building as it is today. Or Hyams dryly says “torn down” when a new building is on the site.
McQueen dispenses with everything that characterizes conventional war documentaries. There are no black and white snippets of film, no yellowed photos, no graying contemporary witnesses who tell the camera their memories. The story is told in dry words only. The images play a completely different role.
“Occupied City” is like an atlas of the crimes of the occupation. Every second of the 130 stories ends with the residents being expelled, arrested, shot in the dunes, deported, or murdered in a concentration camp. The film is also based on a map of the city, Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945) edited by historian Bianca Stigter, McQueen’s partner.
What McQueen added are today’s images. Which can be seen as contrasts – or as comments. They start with recordings from a bar, a television is playing on which Dutch Prime Minister Rutte announces the start of the Covid lockdown in his country.
Curfew then, lockdown today
As a result, McQueen’s camera often moves through an eerily empty city, night and day, and one cannot help but make the mental connection to the nightly curfews under the German occupation. Soon McQueen is recounting the Nazi involvements of the famous Concertgebouw Orchestra, and after that he goes outdoors onto the Museumsplein in front of the Konzerthaus and police officers on horses are seen chasing fleeing anti-lockdown protesters.
There will always be images of the pandemic, of speakers and demonstrators and of police drones hovering menacingly over people – but ultimately McQueen emphasizes the differences more than the parallels, showing many young people who, regardless of bans on gatherings in the streets talking, smoking, drinking.
McQueen seems both to draw attention to the dangers of government coercion and to delight in today’s Amsterdammers who demonstrate a healthy level of resistance – and, unlike their ancestors, can do so in a free society.
So it’s about both memory and the present. Amsterdam was hardly bombed during the war, there could still be many places of remembrance there, but there are not that many, some were deliberately demolished after the war, others fell victim to urban redevelopment. The ones that are still standing – where the Gestapo was based, where Jews were penned up before they were taken away, where resistance groups planned their actions – McQueen shows these places as forgotten about history, handed over to a new use.
Is that history?
He doesn’t really complain about it, he only takes the liberty of pointing out that the Gestapo used to be housed in this high school, where girls are taught today.
McQueen certainly sees the connection between the memory of the oppression of fascism – and the oppressions of the present, which he constantly shows up in the form of rallies and graffiti and airplanes with streamers, whether it’s about Palestine or Falun Gong or the still beneficiaries of the slave trade goes.
Ultimately, this is less a film that appeals to emotions than an essay that asks what consequences one should draw from historical events for today. It lasts – including a short intermission – more than four hours, which in view of its distanced narrative style is quite a challenge for the viewer.
It would also be conceivable at any time as an installation at an exhibition, and in its conception one senses the artist that McQueen is, after all. It is still unclear whether the film will be released in cinemas other than in the Netherlands. But a festival like Cannes is lucky to have shown him.
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