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Like his wife Bianca Stigter’s masterful Three Minutes—A Lengthening, director Steve McQueen’s Occupied City is a non-fiction Holocaust ghost story, although whereas the dead were front-and-center in Stigter’s inquiry, they remain unseen specters throughout the Oscar winner’s latest. A four-and-a-half-hour documentary about the sinewy and intricate bonds between the past and the present, McQueen’s latest—written by Stigter, and inspired by her book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945—is a thoroughly unique and postmodern non-fiction opus. Unconventional and repetitive by nature, it overwhelms via length and monotony, employing a challenging form that’s both its greatest strength and, ultimately, its most frustrating weakness.
Occupied City (in theaters Dec. 25) runs ever-so-slightly longer than Marcel Ophuls’ landmark The Sorrow and the Pity, and its duration is central to its purpose. McQueen’s film concerns the 1940-1945 Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, and it dispenses details about that cataclysmic period via narration from Melanie Hyams that plays over recent snapshots of the city as it grapples with, and emerges from, the COVID-19 pandemic. In each scene, Hyams discusses key people, dates and events that occurred at various metropolitan locales during WWII as McQueen presents footage of those same areas today. The anecdotes relayed about these spots aren’t ordered chronologically. Furthermore, there isn’t always a meaningful relationship between what the settings were then and what they are now; sometimes, a theater has remained a theater, and other times, a prison has become a school, or a hospital has transformed into an apartment building.
McQueen offers no hand-holding entry point into his inquiry; Occupied City begins in an elderly woman’s home as Hyams shares the story of a WWII man who hid Jews from the Third Reich in this domicile. The film leisurely hopscotches from one place of interest to another, discovering incongruous juxtapositions between yesterday and today as frequently as it strikes upon a harmonious echo, like when McQueen’s camera spies an apartment’s picture of a man cradling his newborn while Hyams mentions falsified-ID photographs that were taken by a 1940s Jewish woman. There’s something serendipitous about the way McQueen’s images and Stigter’s prose occasionally align. Still, even when they do—say, talk about a public square that hosted Nazi rallies and is now being used for a contemporary climate protest—the underlying point of such links, if any exists, is difficult to parse.
Hyams’ voiceover never changes in terms of register or pace, and over the course of multiple hours (bifurcated by a 15-minute theatrical intermission), it turns Occupied City into a quasi-dreamy consideration of the Holocaust and modernity’s active and passive connection to it. That’s most explicitly expressed during a sequence of drone shots through Amsterdam’s nocturnal streets during a COVID lockdown, the camera gliding and spinning in hallucinatory fashion. McQueen marries his audio and visuals to suggest the pain and suffering beneath our placid everyday surfaces. To watch people shopping, kids sledding and the elderly doing physical exercises as Hyams relates tales of mass executions, unsuccessful suicide attempts, and monstrously intolerant Third Reich machinations is to confront the idea that the past lurks behind a thin veil, at once shadowy and omnipresent.
Never straying from its structural template, Occupied City refuses to elucidate its grander intentions. That too binds it to Three Minutes—A Lengthening, insofar as both works demand intense consideration of (and “entry” into) the cinematic frame as a way of stimulating the imagination. In many respects, the two docs feel like x-ray complements of each other, including with regards to their wildly divergent runtimes. While Stigter tackled her chosen material in a compact 69 minutes, McQueen cinematically stretches out for 262 minutes, providing scene after scene of humdrum 21st-century action and contrasting commentary about the WWII crimes, tragedies and valiant attempts at resistance that transpired at those identical locations. There’s a deliberate similarity to everything he shows and tells, and how he shows and tells, and by the film’s second hour, that sameness becomes the point—a relentless barrage of banal evil, desperate heroism and heartbreaking injustice and misfortune that’s borderline numbing.
Occupied City seeks to overpower through tedium, and at a certain point, it succeeds in that endeavor. By showcasing myriad nooks and crannies of Amsterdam—from the Red Light District and governmental palaces to the interiors of numerous residences—it hauntingly evokes how historic traumas linger all around us. Nonetheless, by doggedly sticking to a sole modulated tone, the film intermittently devolves into a drone. That’s compounded by its decision to examine the Nazi occupation out of temporal order. Flip-flopping on a whim between years may purposefully contribute to the proceedings’ fragmented nature—which speaks to the incomprehensible madness of the Holocaust—but it also winds up undercutting engagement. When everything feels this randomly arranged, maintaining rigorous focus becomes difficult, if not a chore.
McQueen captures Amsterdam from so many different angles that the doc affords a comprehensive ground-level portrait of the evolving city, from its communal spaces and arterial waterways to its varied architecture and diverse population. There’s a comfortable, lived-in quality to Occupied City that enhances the awfulness of its separate-yet-intertwined narratives of conflict, opposition, cruelty, and slaughter. Bygone nightmares don’t feel far removed from these jovial snippets of current urban life, especially since they’re additionally laced with dread over the (equally invisible) dangers of the pandemic, racial inequity and climate crises—although given how sketchily they’re addressed in this exhaustive investigation, McQueen would have been better served by either further expounding upon those issues or leaving them on the cutting room floor.
Occupied City derives its power from its enormity and its repetitiveness, both of which help it convey the unthinkable horror of the Holocaust: the means by which it was carried out; the wreckage it left in its wake; and its pervasive (overt and covert) presence after all these years. Simultaneously, however, the film falls victim to its defining traits. McQueen recounts the Nazis’ occupation of Amsterdam with a serpentine haphazardness that grows wearisome, as does narration whose uniformity verges on the robotic. Despite its often-bracing disquiet, it hits the same note over and over again until one finally tunes it out.
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