In 1968, German artist Anselm Kiefer perpetrated his provocative art terrorism campaign “Occupations” – photographing himself performing a Nazi salute across Europe – because he was afraid Germans were sweeping the horrors of the Reich under the collective consciousness rug. Yet this week alone there are three films probing the enormity of those horrors and our attitudes toward them: Jonathan Glazer’s cold and clinical The Zone of Interest, Wim Wenders’ own documentary on Kiefer, Anselm, and now Occupied City, Steve McQueen’s monumental study of Amsterdam across the five years during which it was occupied by the Reich, and its Jewish population was almost completely eradicated.
While not as massive and all-encompassing as Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 grand history of the Holocaust, Shoah, Occupied City still runs over four hours (four and a half, if you include the intermission scored by Oliver Coates). Lanzmann needed the time because he was covering so much terrain: McQueen, by comparison, has a much smaller map in mind but is fixated on minuscule detail. This is a building-by-building tour of Amsterdam, its homes, apartments, schools, hospitals, factories, hidey-holes, murder sites, and what happened to their Jewish occupants during the war. It’s all information gathered by McQueen’s wife and creative partner, Bianca Stigter, for her equally encyclopedic book, Atlas van een bezette stad : Amsterdam 1940-1945 (Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945), a nearly 600-page illustrated history of the geography of the occupation, the oppression, and resistance.
There is an undeniable importance to the information gathered, and Stitger’s approach is an intriguing one, stressing location over linear time. For the film version, McQueen tours 130 locations in the modern city, capturing footage that juxtaposes its current life with stories of its wartime existence, recounted from Stitger’s work through a cool, sometimes even wry narration by Melanie Hyams.
The juxtapositions are sometimes illuminating, sometimes forced, sometimes meaningless. Indeed, it’s often not quite clear what McQueen expects the audience to do with this information provided. Every time Hyam intones that a building was demolished, it feels oddly accusatory. In this, McQueen taps into a reality of living in a historic European city, that you always spend your days walking on the traces of events fair and foul, and the reality is that only so much can be preserved.
The research is astounding, truly humanizing the stories surrounding these addresses: stories of revolution, brutalization, suicide, misery, sex, atrocity, bureaucracy, and bigotry. It’s a project of enormous scale, and that’s the issue here. Occupied City is a macro work made up of micro details, and even with that necessary intermission the experience – logically enough – is like trying to read a global gazetteer in one sitting. McQueen and Stitger perform an essential, admirable act by synthesizing this research, and arguably the way to get it in front of most eyes is via the cinematic incarnation of Occupied City. It’s a lot more than simply a string of names and dates and anecdotes, but after this many hours that’s what it starts to become. It’s not that Occupied City is a disservice to this history, but nor can it erase the idea that a complimenting exhibition at a major gallery or museum would make those four hours fly by.
This article appears in January 19 • 2024.
