Occupied by Steve McQueen's City
Dear Friends
I spent Friday in the dark. Most of the day: I walked downtown on the sides of the streets where the sun flooded my eyes, so perhaps I was storing it up. I entered the doors of the Film Forum at 12:30 and didn’t leave again until full dark.
I was there to see Steve McQueen’s new movie, Occupied City, which is four and a half hours long plus an intermission. I was eager. Here’s what I knew: the film was slow, its topic was the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam and the footage was all contemporary—Amsterdam during the time of the coronavirus. I knew the movie went building by building through Amsterdam, showing locations in the present day while a voice told the city’s history during the occupation.
As I sat in the dark, I made notes. I discovered recently that I can write in the dark, and produce something mostly legible. I filled a little yellow notebook with descriptions of what I was seeing and transcriptions of the words I heard.
While we watched images of the exteriors or interiors of 130 building, the voice of a narrator (Melanie Hyams) concisely described their uses and the fate of their inhabitants during the occupation. Her voice was strikingly neutral, only occasionally betraying a shade of emotion. The text she read from was pared-down and factual in tone, but there was an accumulating litany of words for suffering and death. Many of the buildings are no longer standing, and the story for each of those ends in the word demolished, which came to feel like a refrain.
The two channels, visual and verbal competed with each other for my attention and wove shifting juxtapositions. Early on, I was transfixed by what I saw, but the repetitions of language gained force hour by hour. The descriptions became entangled with other bits of audio that occasionally emerged from filmed television screens or events. I had expected to be able to daydream, but I was completely occupied by what I was seeing and hearing, even when I didn’t want to be.
The film ends with a long wordless sequence of views from the window of an empty tram in winter. The final images are of a Bar Mitzvah taking place in a contemporary synagogue and, as the camera pulls away, the closing of the synagogue’s oversized gold-leafed doors.
Transcribing the notebook took a little bit longer than watching the movie.
— Sal
Occupied City
Golden orange corridor, orange closet
Woman going down into the basement
A newspaper publisher
Killing centers
Demolished
Coronavirus on the TV
Lockdown
Kayaks on a canal
Giant teddy bears in hotel chairs to prevent their use
800,000 people; 10% were jewish
The weather was considered a military secret
A big dog walking across a lawn
Ice on the surface of a reflecting pool
Children lying on their stomachs, leaning down to break it
The dog is a shaggy afghan, golden orange
Extreme closeups of oil pantings, the glare of lights
The paint congealed, goopy, translucent
Milk being poured, a Vermeer
Conservators and the Night Watch
A woman dressed as a strawberry
Anti-lockdown protests
Planes overhead with messages:
Emotionally and financially held hostage
We peacefully have a cup of coffee
Police horses
Music by Jewish composers could no longer be played
The hunger winter
So, this other world did still exist
Flash-bangs at the protests, people fleeing
Police horses galloping
Black and yellow uniforms, batons and round shields
Protestor in a fur coat, dancing
Boarded-up luxury stores, Tesla and Prada
A man plays guitar in his home, in front of a window
Photographs, hiding, deportation
A red and black hotel corridor, a wedding dress.
A zoom wedding, a miniature cake
Smuggled Jewish children, betrayed
Shot, threw her body in a canal.
Caravans, gypsies deported, murdered
Demolished
A writer at a window, looking out across the street
The sound of typing
I picked up seven potatoes in the street
and chose a book long enough to boil them.
All public life shut down
Famine
Living in hiding requires willpower
They have the final say
A fat orange and white cat
People ice skating on the canals
Other hiding places
Ration coupons
Peeping mirrors
Raided, arrested, resistance, re-arrested, executed
In, or on the way to, Auschwitz
Sledding; children trying to climb the icy slope
A swimmer passing a houseboat
Things won’t turn out the way you expect
Betrayal and arrest, corruption and collaboration
Earnest electronic music jam; colored lights
Invasion, uprising
Two-stepping to country music in the kitchen
Demolished
There will be a revolt. I hope it starts today.
Filming and photographing the arrival of the king
A memorial
An optical ghetto
Five butchers, five hairdressers, two cafes
The monument of Jewish gratitude
A curfew
The darkness of night; nobody out in the streets
Music and night streets, the full moon
Camera turning up to the sky, camera turning upside down
Deserted streets, locked bicycles, parked cars, streetlights
Two teenage girls piss behind bushes in a street park
Deportation
A boy playing a video game
Rabbits in a hutch at the back of a building
Vaccination center
David Bowie’s Golden Years, jarring, odd
Older people at their vaccination site
Folk singer singing No more fascism now.
Deported, transit center, registration, killing
Towards normal life. To be honest, we’re all longing for it.
Zoo flamingos screeching in the dark
Identity cards, registry
Sunset, pink, grey sky
Someone inside looking out
Trees in silhouette
Arrested, custody, executed, a mass grave
A pink shirt
Rain making rings in puddles on the street
An informer
Living in hiding
The homes of deported Jews
Arrested, died, sentenced, foundlings
Lesbians kissing in front of a judge, a registered partnership
A chair affixed to the wall, a desk that rotates
In the street
Waiting for death or shot dead
Ice cream parlors, the windows smashed
Ice cream, rounded up, condemned to death
A death march
A swimming pool at night, luminous blue
Firewood
Pink sky, blue pool, arms lifting
Yellow light in a park, a few yellow leaves
A cloud of insects in the sunset light, golden
Agreed to tell this lie
Hid on the roof, behind the chimney
Illegal burials
To arrest, exempt
They were not believed
Yoga, meditation, humming
Sparks from cutting a bike lock
Unspoken truth, informers, the bottle of chloroform
Retaliation
Death candidates
A weathered stone lion
The liberation
Drummer with a weathered face, slow procession
A trumpet, the king and queen, everyone in black
freedom from the dutch colonizer as well
Intermission
White fog, the blades of a wind turbine seen from the ground
Killed, demolished
Professional dancers lying on a black dance floor, rising then whirling,
Elderly people in chairs doing guided exercises
Deportation, ordered to report, hand in their house keys,
A mass roundup, the Jewish quarter
Opening and closing the hands,
Managed to escape through a hole
King’s day crowds in the street
Auschwitz, looters
A park, trees, woodpecker sounds, bird calls, birders with binoculars,
Arrested, deported,
A spider in its web
Joggers
Fled into the park and was shot
Trees chopped down and sold during the hunger winter
Sterilization
A room in red light, pulling the curtains open
Calls to report, without prior warning
The sinister atmosphere
Packed so tightly no one could move
Tank, fell to the ground, holding a small child
A child drives a toy car, honking while his father is on the phone
Taking their own lives, ended their lives, chose death
Conjuring tricks
In a suicide note may take a keepsake, take anything you like
Starlings nesting in brickwork holes in the side of a building
Often, entire families died, including children
Sun going down behind clouds, light dimming
A man with a cane walks slowly away between hedges
Illegal publications
Was executed
From the window
Hostages
A nude painting propped in a window
Concentration camps
Resistance
Endless flocks of birds in the darkening sky between buildings
Volunteers made their rounds
Opening a park
The largest air raid shelter
Funk, dancing, dim purple light,
Hunger cells
Letters smuggled out in the laundry
Outdoor chess
Rank among the occupiers
Women had their heads shaved
Steaming wooden bucket
You cannot break me
A ceremony of representation
Carrying out executions
An overpass, trash, an abandoned bicycle
To re-use, to risk
the grim ashen faces
Demolished
A looting bank
A wall of red high school lockers, a student banging on them as he walks past
A wedding with white dove balloons
Bodies left on the ground to intimidate
Small children shrieking for Sinterklaas
She was released again
Boat parade, soap bubbles, blowing horns
In the ensuing dark
The blackout meant the stars were clearly visible
Gulls and discarded Christmas trees
Blood protection
Pedals on a church organ, feet in black shoes dancing across them
The creaking bellows
A snowy park, seen from above, people walking
Landscapes of the park in the snow
Roundups, captured
A boy with white-rimmed glasses applying lip gloss with a wand
not all of these people had drowned
Ballet school, barre work
Repugnant scenes involving soldiers
When there were no potatoes left, the kitchens served sugar beets and tulip bulbs
They were betrayed
Execution, murder, prison
An infinite supply
The last place Jews were allowed to live
Men playing boules, arguing over whose ball is whose
Open the door
The creche, the crash
Secretly stricken from the record
Managed to escape, recaptured,
All the family names
Outdoor swimming
Summer, reggae, young lovers
Off-limits
The oriole and the cuckoo
Open window of a boat, curtain blowing
Arrested for collaboration
Prisoners of war, deserters
People craved entertainment
A circus uniform
An automated door opening and closing over and over again
A corset shop
The milky way
A declaration of loyalty, refugees
A messy apartment, candles
I submerge so I can rise again
A squeezebox accordion
A wet street
A goodbye kiss
A bicycle crash
I simply stood there, frozen
The wheels of an exercise bike
Ukranian refugees on the TV
Both died shortly after
Trains departed the empty station
A child smiles at the camera as she walks by, touching the side of her face
Climate march with a paper maché earth being roasted on a spit
Dancing in the march
A loaf of bread
No avail
Giant elephant puppet
A tram, cello or bass
Gliding down the tracks through city streets
Silent except for the music
Empty car, quiet streets
Into the tram yard, through the tram wash, huge brushes and jets of water
Bell tolling twice
Bar mitzvah
Carrying the torah
Gold-leaf doors
More Information
Occupied City is still in theaters and not available for streaming; you can see the trailer here. The film was “informed by” the book Atlas van een bezette stad: Amsterdam 1940-1945 (Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945) by Bianca Stigter.
A conversation with with Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter about Occupied City is available here.
Further adventures and new ways of seeing can be found in my book, The Uses of Art.
Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.
Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham
A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book.
— Bonnie Friedman
Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara
Attention, close attention. Over hours, and after, making notes, a kind of sense making and generous offering. Thank you
Sal, this is fantastic! I now need to see this film!