Occupied City Review: Steve McQueen’s Holocaust Documentary Wearily Cuts Between Past and Present-Day Amsterdam

In Steve McQueen’s sprawling Occupied City lies a constant interplay between the past and present of Amsterdam. The events recounted in the voiceover stick to the five-year span between 1940 and 1945, when the city came under the Nazi grip. At times, the juxtaposition between contemporary normalcy and past horrors strikes a disquieting blow, but mostly they veer to an imposition.

Through the self-conscious see-saw between the visual and oral litany, McQueen reinforces denial and forgetfulness toward history. You get the point very quickly. An address is zeroed in on and consequently what had transpired there in those years is revealed. Increasingly, however, it gets tougher to locate concise articulations in the slipstream of history, politics, governance and anecdotes of public resistance. Occupied City teems with a wealth of stories. We listen to the tales about families taking their lives via gas asphyxiation, people ratting on their Jewish neighbours. Suicides, carefully planned genocides, the complete annihilation of Jewish presence are mapped out in unblinking detail. The emphasis is on minute remembrance and the largely under-addressed role of the collaborators like a pre-existing Dutch Nazi Party.

How did the city reorganise itself to genuflect to the gathering Nazi occupation? How were the Jews isolated from everyone else? Occupied City drills into the micro, ranging from massive infrastructural overhauls to ghettoisation to the steady removal of Jews from culture, power and privilege. Propaganda seeped into every crevice of the society, including museums and opera houses that wiped out any dissenting artist.

The narratives evoke horror and shock initially but the tedious, deadpan narration eventually leaches off any emotional response. Are we even meant to be feeling anything? I started wondering. What to make of the strictly unemotional tone? Is it just a self-reflexive comment on our complacent, blissfully unbothered attitude to the past, a tendency to look away from its implications as we barrel into the future? The film’s stance of passivity, amid deep dives into history, exasperates because of its tonal indecision between detachment and charged considerations. We drift with the film as it moves through all kinds of neighbourhoods and corners of the city. Its grotesque history unravels in layers, shuttling from institutional complicity in erasures of Jews to the few resistance groups keeping the fight alive. Meanwhile, in the present day, scenes of regular life play out. We watch a group of revellers, while we are told of disturbing things that had happened on the same spot.

The excessive accounts, trying to reaffirm the flickering public memory, don’t work. You yearn for a calm, collected pause at times, which McQueen does provide sometimes like a stunning, sensuous five-minute sequence with the camera sweeping through night-time Amsterdam, the narration mercifully halted for once. But these ellipses are spare. The telling is so verbose, so jampacked with details about names, places and institutions, that after a while everything flattens. The narration sprints, overeager and anxious to parse through neglected memories and episodes and acknowledge them. You struggle to register the subtle intricacies in all the baggy narration.

There are many ghastly incidents enumerated but the gutting power is nowhere to be found. Melanie Hyams’ dry, affect-free voiceover also happens to lend a prissy, lazy, airless slant. Even the verbal refrain of ‘demolition’, which accompanies every site the film swoops on, drops noncommittally. The whole enterprise comes off as vacuous and pointlessly meandering, too smug in a placid authorial distance. There’s a stiffness to Occupied City, a stubbornness to its style which never allows the constant zooming-in to accrue force and sobering critique. You feel like shaking up McQueen and insisting he apply the same rigour of recollection to emotional correlation between the contemporary images and endless volley of facts.