Foolishly, after sitting through a four hour movie (L’Amour Fou) for my first film at Cannes, I chose yet another four hour movie to see for my second film at 10 AM on my second day at the festival. Steve McQueen, British director famous for his Academy Award winning 12 Years a Slave and the critically acclaimed television anthology Small Axe, has premiered his newest project at Cannes, the documentary Occupied City. In his intro to the film, McQueen articulated how he wanted to explore what’s “under [his] bed, under [his] doorstep”.
Occupied City is a comprehensive history of the city of Amsterdam, specifically telling stories of places within the city related to the Nazi occupation of the city during World War II by taking you through locations throughout the city – houses, hospitals, parks, theaters, squares, museums, schools, stores, banks. However, this is told only through narration – visually, the film only shows footage from modern day. Structurally, the narration starts with an address, the place, and the story of what happened there, statistics, facts, and snippets from memoirs, as the camera shows what that place looks like in present day, with much of the footage specifically dated as occurring during the Covid pandemic, with footage of people wearing masks and on zoom calls. Most of the stories end with Jews being deported and sent to various concentration camps, as well as their sympathizers. Many committed suicide rather than face that fate. Many of the informants were jailed after the war. Many of the stories end with the chilling word as a sentence “demolished.”
The result of this clash between past and present creates a strong dissonance between modernity and history. There’s a certain mundanity to the footage, of people living their ordinary lives and following their daily routines, as the audience watches they hear the tragic stories of the people who used to inhabit these same spaces as they faced violent oppression. However, the narration is extremely didactic, perhaps too objective, even keeled and even toned, unemotional and detached. Because the story is an overview of an entire city, the project is so wide in scope that each story is boiled down to the bare minimum of its details rather than expanding upon the humanity of the victims.
While the film is visually stunning, with a really lovely 4:3 aspect ratio, the images have blended into each other in my mind. They feel inconsequential. The narration is far more compelling than the visuals solely due to the subject matter, and the two don’t mesh together filmically. It’s difficult to pay attention to both at the same time because they’re capturing two completely different elements despite being connected by location.
Or perhaps it’s difficult to pay attention due to the repetitive nature of the film and its entirely bloated runtime. While I appreciate the attempt to provide as complete a history as possible, the encyclopedic approach is ineffective. It jams packs you with information and gives you no time or space to process it before moving onto the next one, and not all the information is equally riveting, engaging, or important to the overall narrative of the film. It certainly did not need to be four hours long whatsoever, and I really wish they had trimmed it down for the sake of accessibility. However, I did feel like I learned so much harrowing and important information from this watch. In 1940, Amsterdam’s 800,000 population was 10% Jewish. Over 100,000 people were deported. Only 5,000 returned to the city after the war. 75% of the city’s Jews did not survive the war. Of the 156 documented suicides in 1940, 120 were Jewish, often families, mainly dying via gas asphyxiation, but also drownings and poisonings. When the Nazis took over, they banned weather reporting and declared weather a military secret. And when they decided to segregate Jewish children from schools, the city built over 40 schools only for them to all close due to all the Jewish students getting deported, sent to concentration camps, killed, or living in hiding. The Nazis arrested over 200 Jews who had converted to Catholicism to retaliate against the church’s pushback against their laws and ideals. They also removed all the church bells to melt down into metal.
The film doesn’t just focus on the plight of the Jewish people. It also goes into detail about Amsterdam’s “Hunger Winter” of 1944, where food, electricity, and gas were extremely scarce. The price of a loaf of bread increased by 200xs. This resulted in 4,000 deaths, mainly of old men and young children. It describes the plight of the “Kraut Whores,” women who had relationships with German soldiers that were tarred and shaved and publicly humiliated after liberation. I learned that Indonesian students supported liberation, saying “first free the Netherlands, then Indonesia” as they ideally wanted to be free from colonial power. The Dutch government in exile rejected volunteers from Suriname, stating that they didn’t want “n* words” (articulated as such in the film) to offend the South African volunteers.
One of the stories that stuck with me includes how a pair of middle aged sisters were able to avoid death and deportation by getting verified as only half-Jewish, lying about their deceased mother having an affair with an Aryan man with the helpful verification by his son. They were tested by showing the Nazis their bare legs to determine if they had “Jewish legs,” whatever that means. Another memorable story was how a prison guard that helped Jews escape was later nominated for an award only to receive major backlash, as he helped them in exchange for alcohol and sex, and was arrested for having sex with prisoners. Most of the stories aren’t like these, however. Most of them are X and Y lived here. They were Jewish. They were killed. It repeats this with more and others again and again and again. It’s brutal and devastating, and yet I felt like the detached tone of the narration itself took away from that. Although it leads the audience to draw their own conclusions, I feel like a bit of analysis or extended context and historical repercussions could have been extremely helpful in making the film more robust and ironically, more comprehensive in terms of capturing the emotions beyond the cold hard facts. If you’re going to make a movie about the Holocaust and the suffering of Jewish people, shouldn’t it be more about the people than the places they inhabited?
The film is at its most emotional, at its very end when they finally choose to depict Jews living in present day Amsterdam, a young biracial boy practicing for his Bar Mitzvah. It’s a sweet, heartwarming, and cathartic scene, and yet I remain unsure if it was worth it to sit through the four hour nonstop bombardment of info in order to get there.
In a bit of cultural criticism, it makes me feel a bit ill that the applause the A24 logo received before the film seemed to be louder and more enthusiastic than the applause the film itself received, emblematic of the success of the company to brand itself as the young cool champion of indie cinema.