Somewhere in the third hour of Steve McQueen’s documentary “Occupied City,” the camera slowly dollies left over a list of names in glowing green print on a black background, enumerating the thousands of Jews deported from Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. A moment of silence in the audio mix announces this as an important shot, an occasion to consider the enormity of the loss that this four-and-a-half-hour film itemizes with near-comprehensive diligence. But we can’t see all the names, the columns of text so large that the upper half of each one has been fuzzed out of focus. Moreover, the visible words can’t all be scanned in time for individual attention, so numerous that we can only glean a broad impression of the tragedy’s cumulative size. In trying to capture everything, he makes it difficult to concentrate on anything.
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The mechanics of how a viewer internalizes information bedevil McQueen’s cataloging of history and geography in this visual adaptation of his wife Bianca Stigter’s nonfiction tome, “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945.” Her book (and the script she wrote for this project, delivered in a constant, affectless voiceover by Melanie Hyams) goes door to door, relating brief accounts of death and defiance during the Holocaust by address in the Dutch city the couple calls their part-time home. As the narration inundates the audience with condensed profiles of love, betrayal, violence, and triumph, McQueen shows the locations in question as they stand — or, in many sad cases of demolition, do not stand — today, eschewing all archival footage and talking-head interviews for a minimalist travelogue overlaying past onto the present. There’s no mistaking their shared motivation to render the terrible toll of this period as something deeper than anonymized data, but the overload of dates and names ultimately works against that noble goal. We’re implored to never forget through a format that makes particulars prohibitively hard to remember.
On the page, the exhaustive research can be pored over and revisited at one’s own pace, a useful resource of reference; the temporal linearity of cinema, molding this footage into an experience of daunting length divided by a fifteen-minute intermission, moves from one account to the next with a brutal sense of efficiency. Even when dispensed at an unhurried pace, the sheer volume of suffering and its incongruity to the images onscreen make the simple act of watching into a mental race to keep up. The emphasis on individual acknowledgment has the opposite of its intended effect, the crushing memory of each successive anecdote overwritten until only a general notion of vast decimation remains. Ironically, the final figure that 80% of the city’s once-robust Jewish population had been erased by 1945 sticks in the brain with more indelible firmness than any other factoid.
Most of what can be reasonably gleaned pertains to Amsterdam circa three years ago, a confluence of assorted crises that passed by McQueen’s lens while the lockdown halted full-crew work. Like a humorless John Wilson, he finds rhymes between the snatches of city life and the speech superimposed over it, collapsing the distance from then to now. Talk of the jackbooted Nazi officers’ imposition of martial law accompanies a passage focused on the modern police state that seized COVID-19 as a pretense to amass further power. (One eerie shot of a hovering cop drone puts a bitter edge on the sumptuous, weightless digital shooting, which climaxes in a 360-degree twirl with greater visceral heft than the drily delivered blocks of prose.) Another juxtaposition connects the Third Reich’s doctrine of anti-Semitism to the current racism inherent in the Dutch tradition of donning blackface to portray Zwarte Piet come Christmastime. Sometimes, as in a musical interlude with a stoic accordionist who welcomes McQueen into his home for an impromptu concert, a Wiseman-esque philosophy of community as a multifarious social ecosystem peeks out from behind the lecturing.
These fleeting reprieves of spontaneity feel precious for their scantness in an experiment more effective in concept than practice as it tests the line between exhaustive and exhausting. In one segment, the bereaved complete the Hebrew ritual of laying stones atop a grave as a legacy-keeping gesture, a ceremony previously documented by Steven Spielberg for the coda of “Schindler’s List.” The roll call of each surviving Schindler Jew presages McQueen and Stigter’s efforts in cataloging for moral posterity, though by the end of Spielberg’s film, we’ve shared in enough dramatized hardship to bring meaning to the sight of these real people. When we see Joseph and Rebecca Bau, we can think back to the scene of their marriage in the hell of the camps — plus, it helps that their names have been matched to their faces with a clearly visible caption. The beat’s emotional wallop illustrates how far a little showing can go, a truism McQueen rejects with a limiting approach that opts instead to tell and tell and tell. [B-]
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