Steve McQueen’s 'Occupied City' is Self-Serving and Insincere
A Kanye West collaborator claims to care about anti-Semitism.
In December, I criticized Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust drama Zone of Interest for being “a gallery installation, not a story.” That was before I’d had the opportunity to suffer through all 4+ hours of Occupied City, the recent documentary from acclaimed director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Shame), and having now done so, I feel as though I may owe Mr. Glazer an apology. Occupied City, which is nominally about also about the Holocaust, makes Zone of Interest look like an entry in the John Wick franchise by comparison. But it’s problem isn’t that it’s slow - it’s problem is that, like Zone of Interest, its entire meaning becomes readily apparent after viewing but a single scene. That McQueen gave the movie such an epic length suggests he is either a sadist or simply believes that a longer running time makes the film more profound. Spoiler alert: it does not.
Based on his wife Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945, the premise of Occupied City is this: contemporary footage of various locations in Amsterdam is accompanied by voice-over, performed by Melanie Hyams, describing that location’s history during World War II, when Amsterdam was under Nazi rule. You’re looking at a modern hotel and being told all about the atrocities committed there; you’re looking at a modern street full of modern clothing stores and being told all about the atrocities committed there; you’re looking at an empty lot and being told all about the atrocities committed when there was once a building there.
That’s it. That’s all that happens. Again and again and again for 490 minutes.
The point is clear: today’s society is housed on the same land as yesterday’s horrors. And while that’s certainly a point worth making, McQueen’s approach is missing a crucial element - specifically, some explanation as to why that’s a point worth making.
That’s why I can’t help but think that Occupied City would have been more effective if McQueen had applied the same tactic to any number of cities or towns in America instead of Amsterdam; America continues to be propped up by the fruits of slaves’ labors (to say nothing of the fact that literally all the land is stolen), a fact which a substantial portion of the country refuses to confront or even acknowledge. I haven’t been to Amsterdam in some time, but I don’t get the impression that that country has the same problem as the U.S., especially because the context is so very different: Amsterdam’s entire infrastructure isn’t the result of persecution, whereas you have people in the States traversing roads and utilizing buildings made with the literal blood, sweat, and tears of kidnapped Africans on a daily basis. In other words, even if the Nazis had never invaded the Netherlands, Amsterdam’s various shopping centers and tourist attractions would likely still exist in some form or another, whereas America would be nothing if not the for the exploitation of enslaved Blacks.
The closest McQueen comes to drawing any kind of actual connection between the Amsterdam of 1940 and the Amsterdam of today is when he showcases local law enforcement using violent means to break up a protest of COVID-induced lockdowns, not-so-tacitly implying that health officials trying to stop the spread of a deadly virus are as bad as Nazis.
(I’m not saying Amsterdam police were right to use tear gas and water hoses to end the protest, by the way - I’m just pointing out that Jews in the Holocaust were subjected to a considerably more lethal form of showers and gas, and likely would have welcomed a punishment no more severe than “Go to your home and stay there.”)
Regardless, there is simply no justification for Occupied City’s length, and no reason to make yourself watch the entire thing. It’s a mesa, not a mountain: the view from any given point is the same as the view from any other given point.
The needless redundancy of whole endeavor, and its failure to draw any actual corollaries with the modern world, smacks of pretentiousness; it also comes off as self-serving and offensive. This is because McQueen has, in the past, collaborated with Kanye West, a raging anti-Semite who McQueen still has yet to publicly denounce. The closest he has come to disavowing the rapper is a 2018 interview in which he said, “I’ve been disappointed with [West’s] actions recently, but at the same time, I love him… people go through certain situations, phases, and that’s about as much as I can say about it, really.” Good to know anti-Semitism is, in McQueen’s estimation, just a phase.
Given this, how can anyone believe McQueen’s intentions with regards to Occupied City are sincere? McQueen might argue that he can’t himself be latently anti-Semitic because “Where my son went to school was a Jewish school,” which is an even weaker version of the “Some of my best friends are Jewish” bullshit. But McQueen won’t speak out against bigotry when it counts - only when it might win him accolades.