Occupied City

Steve McQueen has lived in Amsterdam for years. His wife, the historian Bianca Stigter, wrote Atlas of an Occupied City, a street-by-street account of what happened at every address in the city between 1940 and 1945. The film is four and a half hours long, premiered at Cannes in 2023 as a special screening, and is one of the most severe formal experiments any major director has attempted recently.

The structure is absolute. A narrator states an address and recounts what took place there — a family deported, a resistance printing press, a Nazi party office, a hiding place that held and one that did not — and ends, very often, with the word demolished. Simultaneously, McQueen's camera shows that location in present-day Amsterdam, filmed between 2020 and 2022: a cycle lane, a nursery, a covid protest, a skating rink, an apartment window with someone practising piano. The two tracks almost never comment on each other. The viewer does all the work.

It divided people sharply, and the length is not incidental — the accumulation is the argument, and a shorter version would prove nothing. What the film establishes, hour by hour, is that a city's ordinary surface is laid directly over an inventory of specific rooms and specific names, and that the two are not connected by anything except the fact of the same address.