Occupied City sees its release on Christmas day. A festive four and a half hours of Nazi terror in occupied Holland. Cheers, Steve McQueen. Pass the Jonge Genever!
While the film is like an advent calendar (except the doors hide bullying, betrayal, and murder rather than chocolates), the release date is a surprising choice. Is it condemning Christianity on one of its biggest holidays, or has it picked the date because of the examples of heroism and kindness found throughout the film?
The format of the piece is simple. McQueen took a small crew out for months, recording the locations in historian Bianca Stigter’s book, Atlas of an Occupied City. They worked with natural light and 35mm film, which gives it all a sepulchral, chilly feel as if made in perpetual winter. We observe modern life at a series of locations while wartime records about them are narrated with perfect clarity by the inexhaustible Melanie Hyams. Did I mention this goes on for nearly five hours?
“…recording the locations in historian Bianca Stigter’s book, Atlas of an Occupied City…”
McQueen’s initial idea was to superimpose newer footage onto wartime photography as a sort of time-traveling ghost hunt, which was a task he found he couldn’t realize but a great jumping-off point for the film he found. As it’s based on an atlas, it’s probably worth knowing the geography; Amsterdam’s center resembles a split log, with semi-circular canals and a complement of tree-lined, cobbled streets radiating from a fat reach in the Amstel River.
And, unless I’m badly mistaken, we spend most of the film within these few streets in the center. Is this dark tourism, conceiving itself handily as a stroll? A map to the scars, if you will? It struck me that I didn’t see the outskirts and that perhaps the form of a walkable atlas had throttled the action.
But then it works so well as an atlas and a film. It’s superficially a little like a static version of the city walks made popular on YouTube by high-definition phone cameras. The sound recording captures the ambiance of Amsterdam with a rich clarity; from the chaos of roadworks to the whisper of thousands of bicycles at rush hour, the beauty of McQueen’s adopted city takes a starring role.
This experience is very different from the previous Stygian stabs at the misery of Holland’s occupation. Soldier of Orange was so hard-edged that I saw it as a kid and imagined it featured a custom-built castration complex, such was the mind-smashing brutality of a key character’s death (a giant syringe is emptied into a man’s open, screaming mouth before he is led sobbing to a guillotine) But then that’s Verhoeven.
"…a perfectly composed treat..."
