How Director Steve McQueen Conjured Up Ghosts of Amsterdam in 'Occupied City' - Haaretz
The Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen and his partner Bianca Stigter explain in an interview with Haaretz how they made a powerful documentary about the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam without using a single second of archive footage. 'Having the knowledge is crucial, but it's what you do with it that counts, says McQueen
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Informed by the book "Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940–1945)" by his historian-director wife Bianca Stigter, the Oscar-winning filmmaker crafts a narrative that burrows into the heart of the Dutch capital during its dark days under Nazi occupation – all without showing a single historical image from the Holocaust.
McQueen's epic documentary overlays a narration by actress Melanie Hyams on visuals of 2020s Amsterdam, in order to recount the fate of some of the city's 75,000-strong Jewish community during World War II. Ultimately, three-quarters of the Netherlands' Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, the most of any Western European country, after a civil occupying regime was imposed on the Dutch by the Nazis.
Hyams' detailed narration covers 130 locations, revealing the experiences of Jews who lived, worked and were rounded up and deported from these sites to Nazi concentration camps.
It also tells of resistance, famine, strikes and the efforts of those helping to conceal the city's Jews (although Amsterdam's most famous Jewish residents, the Franks, do not feature). The audio details are juxtaposed against images of modern-day Amsterdam sites, including such quotidian scenes as a dance class, ice skating on a frozen canal and a sing-along at a retirement home.
In one scene, we see a family living in an apartment as Hyams describes its past as the home of a Jewish family sent to a concentration camp. Another shows a square, once a stage for a wartime public execution, now alive with climate change protesters.
Haaretz"Occupied City" presents a contrasting image: families leading seemingly ordinary middle-class lives inhabiting homes where Jewish lives were torn apart. Elsewhere, a building that once served as a holding point for Jews en route to Auschwitz is now a gym
The film was shot at a unique moment in time, the COVID pandemic, and weaves its way from quiet streets to a revived public life. The narration, meanwhile, revisits '40s Amsterdam – where weather forecasts vanished from the newspapers since they were deemed a "military secret" – and those roundups, deportations, deprivation and, ultimately, liberation.
"Occupied City" has been winning plaudits at festivals worldwide, including in Israel, since premiering at the Cannes Film Festival last May. It is now showing in the United States and will open in Britain next month. It will also be released in Israel later this year.
McQueen first rose to prominence as an artist, winning the Turner Prize in 1999 for his video "Deadpan," which recreated a classic Buster Keaton stunt, and his early work was aimed at art galleries, not movie theaters. That changed with the 2008 drama "Hunger," about hunger-striking IRA prisoner Bobby Sands. In 2014, with "12 Years a Slave," he became the first Black director of a film to win the Academy Award for best picture.
'Parallel narratives'
The events of World War II have clearly been on McQueen's mind of late. In addition to his Holocaust documentary, he has also written and directed "Blitz," a drama set against the backdrop of the Nazi bombardment of London in 1940-41. His hometown and his adopted home of Amsterdam both played a part in his decision to make "Occupied City."
"I'm not from Amsterdam, I'm from London, and living in a former occupied city felt odd to me, as if it harbored another haunted narrative," he says in a Zoom interview with his partner Stigter. "While Bianca was writing the book in another room, I kept pondering this idea of parallel narratives."
There's the saying, If you don't know your past, you don't know your future – but what we've come to realize is that our past doesn't always teach us. If it did, we might be in a better situation.
Steve McQueen
"I'm fascinated by the fact that you live in a city that looks approximately the same as it did between 1940 and 1945," says Stigter, who herself directed the acclaimed 2021 Holocaust documentary "Three Minutes: A Lengthening." "For the most part, people don't know what happened at these locations during that time, so I created ["Atlas of an Occupied City"] like a guidebook to show what happened, street by street, house by house and sometimes even floor by floor."
Initially, McQueen considered combining archive shots and his own footage, so "you had the living and the dead in the same frames," However, inspired by Stigter's book, he ultimately decided to rely on the text alone to evoke the past. (The book itself is so far only available in Dutch.) "That led to the idea of layering one upon the other," he says.
Unlike more conventional works, the documentary doesn't interview survivors or historians either. "I didn't want to make it dusty," McQueen explains. Instead, he says he was interested in making the specters of the Holocaust urgent and necessary. "How do you bring it into the now but in a new light?" he asks.
Stigter adds: "By observing the present and discussing the past without relying on the traditional black-and-white, grainy images of documentaries, you might understand that, despite watching a film screen, it's also like looking into a mirror. The individuals from the past are much like us. They lived in a colorful world, surrounded by diverse events. This insight reveals that, even though their lives unfolded in a different era, they are not so dissimilar to ours," she says.
Contrasting image
On "Three Minutes: A Lengthening," McQueen co-produced while Stigter directed the film, which is based on a 1938 home movie discovered by Glenn Kurtz. That footage, shot by Kurtz's grandfather David in the Polish town of Nasielsk, captured the daily life of a Jewish community just before the Holocaust. Fewer than 100 of its 3,000 Jewish residents survived the war: the film, narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, explored those fleeting moments of normalcy and joy, a people unaware of their fate.
"Occupied City" presents a contrasting image, a revitalized city, 80 years on: families leading seemingly ordinary middle-class lives inhabiting homes where Jewish lives were tragically torn apart. Elsewhere, a building that once served as a holding point for Jews en route to Auschwitz is now a gym.
This dark history, McQueen suggests, still exists along the canals and alleyways of his adopted hometown. His lens captures the vivid hues of present-day Amsterdam – a city pulsing with the challenges and changes wrought by the COVID pandemic and shifts in the social fabric. Ultimately, the film emerges as a deeply moving meditation on memory, the relentless march of time, and our shared journey toward an unwritten future.
Shot during lockdown and the subsequent reopening of society, "Occupied City" also reflects on the broader crises facing Europe and the world. It starts with scenes captured during the pandemic, including the rededication of a Holocaust memorial, a climate crisis march, a ceremony acknowledging and apologizing for the Netherlands' colonial past, and a reception of Ukrainian refugees at an Amsterdam center.
By observing the present and discussing the past without relying on the traditional black-and-white, grainy images of documentaries, you might understand that, despite watching a film screen, it's also like looking into a mirror.
Bianca Stigter
"Life happens, and as an artist I learn to expect and anticipate the unexpected," McQueen says of the scenes he captured during three-and-a-half years of filming. He attaches an importance to "just looking at something and allowing things to happen" – something that is also always present in his fictional work.
McQueen's film doesn't just show us the streets and exteriors of Amsterdam's buildings. He also ventures into people's homes and says he was astounded by the willingness of people to open their doors to him. "Ninety-eight percent of people, when learning about the subject, opened their doors to us. It was truly amazing," he says.
'Reflection and understanding'
While many U.S. critics have responded positively to the documentary, some have kvetched about both the approach and epic running time (246 minutes, including a short intermission). The narration is sometimes set against the backdrop of a seemingly arbitrary selection of images, yet this generates a deliberate contrast that in the end only enhances the historical stories.
McQueen stresses the importance of creating space within the narrative "to let it breathe, allowing viewers to form their own interpretations."
For Stigter, the approach lets the viewer "grasp the enormity of the past. While numerous stories are told, countless others remain unheard, beyond our reach."
As for the running time, she notes: "It can't be neatly condensed into an hour and a half then simply set aside. Its significance demands more time for reflection and understanding.
"What you hear is something different from what you see," she says. "Every scene invites you to consider the connections between past and present. Is there a link? Should there be one? If you watch it multiple times, you might find different answers each time," she adds.
"And it's not necessarily symmetrical," McQueen interjects. "Sometimes there's no connection. There's the saying - if you don't know your past, you don't know your future – but what we've come to realize is that our past doesn't always teach us. If it did, we might be in a better situation than we currently find ourselves."
The breadth and meticulousness of "Occupied City" is astounding, its demands on the viewer lingering long after the lights come up. What haunts is not just the distinctive portrayal of the Jewish community's obliteration during the Holocaust or the desolation of Amsterdam. It's the realization that this narrative, centered on one city, in one nation, is but a single thread in a vast, tragic tapestry.
The systematic, relentless extermination of Jewish life and fracturing of societies and communities left an indelible mark on most towns and cities in Europe, from the western reaches of France to the eastern borders of Ukraine. The tragedy of Amsterdam is the tragedy of Europe; almost 80 years after its liberation, it still lingers on every street corner.
Yet the film also conjures up images of regeneration, where communities are revived, where the crimes and horrors of the past are acknowledged, where people are fighting for a better future. As much as commemoration is important, "it's also important to forget," McQueen says.
"Having the knowledge is crucial, but it's what you do with it that counts," he says. "It's about building for the future and how one uses that knowledge to make something constructive in the present."