Amsterdam at war, and under lockdown
Steve McQueen's movie offers an indirect view of the Holocaust
“Demolished” is the heartrending word we keep hearing in Steve McQueen’s new movie Occupied City. A narrator describes Holocaust events and pegs them to their physical locations in the city of Amsterdam. Instead of organizing a narrative chronologically or through the experiences of specific personages, the movie visits a sequence of street addresses and records the contemporary appearance of each place, while the narrator tells of the violence and chaos of the war.
A surprisingly small percentage of the buildings–and none of the humans–that the narrator describes are presently visible on this tour of Amsterdam. So when the narrator concludes a description of a building with a terse “demolished,” you can’t help but think about everything that’s been lost to history, including the tens of thousands of Amsterdam Jews who died during the occupation. In the first scene a woman manages her kitchen while the narrator talks about hiding from the Nazis, and we realize that the larder into which the present-day woman is casually reaching was once a place of refuge and mortal terror.
The tales of theaters and schools offer the most continuity with the present, since institutions have been less likely to be bulldozed than residences. Or maybe it’s just that actors and students are engaged in a timeless activity, and it was easier for me to sync McQueen’s contemporaneous images with the historical narrations. Even fast food locations have historical resonance in a city like Amsterdam.
The human figures, the tram operators and bar patrons and bums, who are not identified in title cards or described in any direct way, still offer glimpses into a lost past, even if they don’t match up with the historical content of the movie. Swimmers of canals, or kids on ice skates and sleds, or retail and restaurant workers attending to their duties all have the same lyrical intensity as the images from McQueen’s Hunger, the Bobby Sands movie starring Michael Fassbender. In some sense, current residents are “re-occupying” a physical space in a positive and reconstructive way, a point McQueen makes in his quietly powerful final scene of a local bar mitzvah.
Occupied City is based on Bianca Stigter’s book, published in 2019, but the movie adaptation was filmed during COVID lockdown, an inescapable reality that reworks Amsterdam something like the way the Nazis’ takeover did. McQueen doesn’t really compare Dutch civil authorities to Nazi genocidaires, he’s just alive to the constraints and resistances of his surroundings and sees them as part of the unending development of a place.
Anne Frank is mentioned (I think twice, briefly) but there’s no visit to the huis at Prinsengracht 263. The place-based history tends to blur the individual lives discussed. Instead of focusing on Amsterdam’s most famous Holocaust victim, we get a more panoramic view of the citywide (and indeed worldwide) struggle.
Over the four-hour running time, a particular effect accumulates: we keep seeing the discrepancy between contemporary images and the inaccessible nightmare of the war years. The narration describes something invisible while Amsterdammers chatter in Dutch, or we’re briefly dazzled by some brilliant photography. The two inputs (oral and visual) compete with each other and some of the content becomes obscured. An outlandish example of this effect can be found in Peter Greenaway’s The Falls, a fictional history that amounts to a multimedia avalanche. In McQueen’s hands, though, the partially obscured subject matter is a neat demonstration of the impossibility of really understanding history, biased as we are by our inescapable present. We can’t read two texts at once.
I emerged from the Roxie Theater into a drizzly San Francisco afternoon, and walked slowly to the public library branch to return my Hieronymus Bosch loan. The Mission District has long been beset by gentrification and it was impossible not to connect the movie with the city I moved through. Victorian façades harked back to another place, another time, even if they were typical of San Francisco. I found myself looking at the jade plants and stoop decorations and seeing humanity in the urban flotsam.