"People do forget, and that is OK: "Occupied City" challenges how we recall the Holocaust

Steve McQueen’s first documentary, “Occupied City,” is a doozy — a four-and-a-half-hour film, with intermission, featuring a voiceover narration by Melanie Hyams talking about Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. This narrative thread is juxtaposed with images of the city during COVID. It sounds like a lot — and it is — but this hypnotic project, written by McQueen’s wife, Bianca Stigter, and based on her book “Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945)” dutifully explores themes of oppression and resistance. These topics have been embedded in McQueen’s films, such as “Hunger” and “12 Years a Slave,” and here they have the added value of showing how the past informs the present.  

“Occupied City” recounts the history of persecution of Jewish citizens, the Roma, homosexuals and others by mapping out places where arrests and deaths took place. As addresses of houses, schools, theaters, parks, hospitals and other sites are reported, Hyams’ narration indicates what took place there, including betrayals, interrogations, deportations, sterilizations, suicides and more. But the visuals show the location’s contemporary use and depicts everyday life unfolding during the pandemic. 

The juxtaposition allows viewers to reflect on how much has changes in 80 years — and how much has not. White Supremacy is still pervasive and dangerous. There are connections between the Nazi era and COVID with talk about ID/vaccination cards, boarded-up storefronts, curfews and food distribution shortages. Protests still need to take place to change minds. (Episodes depict anti-fascism and climate change rallies). There are also scenes that memorialize what has occurred in the past with monuments, including the Holocaust Memorial of Names, that emphasize the importance of collective memory.

McQueen and Stigter’s film is, admittedly and deliberately, numbing. But there is a power to the repetition as horrific stories of violence, corruption and collaboration are recalled. And viewers may want to learn more about the Hunger Winter or the February Strike Protest, a massive public act of resistance. Likewise, viewers may wonder about individuals to understand what drove a Jewish woman to turn a Jewish family over to the Nazis? Or, how effective was an individual’s resistance work during the occupation before he was caught and killed?

During the Telluride Film Festival, where the documentary had its U.S. premiere, McQueen and Stigter spoke with Salon about making “Occupied City.”

You take a very specific approach to telling this story. What decisions did you make adapting this book into a documentary and a four-and-a-half-hour one at that? 

Steve McQueen: I am a Londoner who came to Amsterdam 27 years ago and met Bianca. We live in a formerly occupied city. The fact that these buildings are 17th-century city buildings, which existed during the war, pushed forward the idea of the past in the present. There was this immediacy. It was interesting investigating it. I thought about finding footage from that time and marrying that footage with contemporary times and projecting one image on top of the other, so it reinforces the buildings, and you can see the living and the dead in the same frame. But then I thought, Bianca was writing this book, “Occupied City,” and I thought of using the text as the past and the images as the present.

Bianca Stigter: Amsterdam wasn’t bombed very much during the war, so officially, it didn’t leave such a big impact, so to say. When you are in Amsterdam, you see the 17th-century canals. Knowing what happens, from the text in the book, and putting that on what you can almost feel but cannot see, you get this kind of tension. Sometimes you can recognize something in the text [with the visuals] and sometimes not at all. This is the past not coming back. You feel that in different ways. Amsterdam has changed because of the war.

McQueen: The film is like an archaeological dig in a way because you have layers of history. You have 17th century, the Second World War, and the present day and everything in between. Sometimes it merges, sometimes it fractures, sometimes it repels. Some things fit like a glove, other things are so opposite and contrarian and challenging and confronting. It is one of the situations that the liberty of now is because of what happened in the past. That is apparent when you have a house where a whole family [died by] suicide and you [see] a gentleman playing Spanish guitar for his grandchild. Maybe he is oblivious to what actually happened, but the reason he is there, unfortunately, is because of what happened in the past.

Stigter: For me, it is very much that the past didn’t end, and the present doesn’t end. You feel those things. There is randomness in there. In the city, so many things happen, and this film tells you that you can’t know it all. 

Occupied City (A24)

Can you talk more about how you married the history with the contemporary scenes? I was disturbed by a discussion of death and suicide being reported over images of people partying.  

McQueen: The perverse is within our everyday. It is part of our lives. There is no point in hiding it. The fact of the matter is these things happen. Coincidences happen. In a place where people [died by] suicide, other people are partying. It’s the power of life. It is to be embraced. It is not about things that are in sync. Things that are totally out of sync can appeal to us. What is totally out of sync is an idea of freedom. People have been liberated because of those events. As an artist and filmmaker, at least in this sense, it wasn’t about having that kind of control, but allowing things to be themselves and showing it for what it is.

Stigter: With every new scene, you are invited to negotiate the relationship between the past and present and you. There is not one form for it. There is a monument, but it is also in the different ways you negotiate those connections. 

What I appreciated most in your film was the idea of memorialization. There are discussions about street names being changed, monuments being erected and other forms of commemoration, including Bianca’s book and this film. Can you talk about creating collective memory and its importance?

McQueen: People do forget. And that is OK. This film is a meditation, it is not something to hit people on the head with. It’s about the fluidity of life, and the changing of life.

Stigter: You can see how the Second World War is remembered in Amsterdam. It changes. After the war, there was a lot of attention on the resistance workers and there were statues raised for them. What happened to the Jewish citizen, there were no monuments for that. That changed in the '60s. In the '70s, other groups, like Roma, homosexuals [were commemorated].

McQueen: The climate changes, therefore memory changes, and therefore history changes.

There are several scenes recounting historical resistance and depicting contemporary protests. The forces of white supremacy, racism, xenophobia and homophobia remain pervasive. How did you consider these issues? There is talk about Roma in the historical narrative, and a scene of a same-sex union in the visuals. I kept wanting more connections.

McQueen: You can make sense out of it. You can make nonsense out of it. People are looking for some kind of answer within the images, and sometimes it is just how it is.

Stigter: There is never one comparison — this happened then, and this happens now. It never makes this very simple equation. You have to find a connection or see that there is no connection.

McQueen: What happened at that location now, and what happened at that location then, doesn’t necessary mean they are married. It is of the time. That’s what happens with liberty and people can do what they want. 

You feature many static shots that absorb the feeling of a place, we sit with the scenes, but you also feature a stunning sequence where the camera moves and turns upside-down, disorienting viewers. A penultimate sequence moves with an empty tram car, creating a bubble that one could see as being symbolic with a deportation train, or COVID. Can you talk about creating the film’s hypnotic visuals?

McQueen: It is regurgitating everything you see travelling through the city. It is how not to be judgmental. It’s finding it, which is like listening, rather than looking. That language is felt, and working with my DP, Lennert [Hillege], that is what we did. Putting the camera in the right position is about feeling it. What is the location telling you, showing you, asking you what to do? There is no structure and no rhyme or reason other than putting the camera in the right position. It’s difficult to articulate. It is a feeling of what this space gives you.

There are descriptions of violence that are reported but not shown. One involving an open sewer, blows to the head, and kicking was particularly horrific. We are forced to imagine the horrors. Can you discuss this aspect of your film? It is very palpable even though you don’t see any of it.

McQueen: The violence is shocking because it is personal. How we describe the violence is shocking because you know the person and have an idea of the person and you are seeing images that are contemporary. It is shocking because this happened to civilians . . .

Stigter: . . .  in this nice and beautiful-looking place. How can you reconcile those two things? Sometimes you just can’t.

McQueen: In one particular location, you are in a hospital where a lady gets kicked and has a miscarriage, and then you have people drinking wine in the sun, and people pushing children, and on their bikes being carefree on a beautiful summer afternoon. For that to happen, people fought for their liberty. To marry the two is very confronting, but that is what makes the power of the movie.

Am I correct that the film has been cut down from 36 hours?

McQueen: Yes, I shot 36 hours of footage. I have a 36-hour film. I’m going to do something else with it. 

Stigter: The film needs the length. It was very important to film so much [footage] because things you don’t expect will appear in front of your camera.

McQueen: The editing process with myself and Xander [Nijsten] was so interesting. What did we have, and what would make a narrative within a feature film setting? Working with film as a medium to make this picture was not about bad reportage or interviews or found footage. I wasn’t going against that. The subject was asking me to work in this way. It’s about filmmaking. How you tell a narrative is still to be played with. This subject refused for me to work in any convention.

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Can you talk about these ideas of resistance against oppression, which are themes in all of your films, but also in Bianca’s previous documentary, the remarkable “Three Minutes — A Lengthening.”

Stigter: The way you went about the projects, the smallest thing can become an event worth watching. Because of that value of life. That nothing is unimportant. That was a beautiful message of the movie.

McQueen: It’s a meditation on looking. Often, when you look at something, obviously, you go somewhere else. It can be a starting point for a thought. It’s like living with artwork. People live with artwork forever because it’s a starting point for a conversation. It’s not the be all and end all. What happens outside the frame is just as important as what happens inside the frame. 

Stigter: It’s not a history lesson. It’s an experience. 

“Occupied City” opens in select cinemas in New York and Los Angeles on Christmas Day with a national rollout to follow.