Tag Archives: Covid

A snapshot of how a city survives

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Watching Occupied City by Steve McQueen for New Scientist, 31 January 2024

Artist and director Steve McQueen’s new documentary unfolds at a leisurely pace. Viewers will be glad of the 15-minute intermission baked into the footage, some two hours into the film’s over-four-hour runtime. If you need to make a fast getaway, now’s your chance — but I’ll bet the farm that you’ll return to your seat.

McQueen, a Londoner, now lives in Amsterdam with his wife Bianca Stigter, and Occupied City is based on Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945, Stigter’s monumental account of the city’s wartime Nazi occupation.

Narrator Melanie Hyams recites the book’s gazetteer of the occupation, address by address, while McQueen films each place as it appears today. Here is the street market where they used to hand out Star of David patches to the city’s Jews. (60,000 of the city’s 80,000 Jews were expelled during the second world war, and almost all of those taken were subsequently murdered.) Outside this now busy cafe, someone once found a potato in the gutter, and burned a book to cook it. At this site, in the “Hunger Winter” of 1944-1945, the diving boards at a since demolished swimming pool were chopped up for firewood. Here, a family was saved. There, a resistance worker was betrayed.

Though many of the buildings still stand, the word “demolished” recurs again and again, and it’s rare that McQueen’s street photography does not capture some new bit of demolition or construction. Amsterdam does not stay still. So how does a living, changing city remember itself?

There are acts of commemoration of course — among them a royal visit to a Jewish holocaust memorial, and a municipal apology for the predations of the city’s participation in the slave trade. But a city’s identity runs deeper than memorials surely? Do drinkers at this bar remember the Jews who were beaten outside their windows? Do the occupants of that flat know about the previous owners, a Jewish couple who committed suicide, sooner than live under Nazi occupation?

Stigter’s Atlas is an act of remembrance. Her husband’s film is different: a snapshot of how a city survives being managed and choreographed, corralled and contained. Some of Occupied City was shot during a five-week Covid lockdown. We see the modern city beset by plague, even as we hear of how, in the past, it was brought near to destruction by foreign occupation. McQueen draws no facile parallels here. Rather, we’re encouraged to see that restrictions are restrictions and curfews are curfews, whoever imposes them, and whatever their motives. What’s interesting is to see how people react to civil control, as it becomes (whether through necessity or not) increasingly heavy-handed.
At a big anti-fascist rally, conducted outside the city’s Concertgebouw concert hall, a speaker announces that “Democracy is more fragile then ever.”

Is it, though? Occupied City would suggest otherwise. It’s a film full of ordinary people, eating, playing guitar (badly), playing videogames, smoking, sheltering from the rain, and walking dogs in the mist. It’s a film about citizenry who survived one lethal onslaught now handling another one — not so obviously violent, perhaps, but pervasive and undoubtedly lethal.

Occupied City is not about what people believe. It’s about how they behave. And, lo and behold, people are mostly decent. Leave us alone, and we’ll go tobogganing, or skating, or cycling, or dancing. We’re civically minded by nature. The nightmares, the riots, the beating and betrayals — these only surface when you start putting us in boxes.

A spirit of anarchism pervades this monumental movie. It’s not anti-authoritarian, exactly; it’s just not that interested in what authority thinks. Reeling as we are from the dislocations of Covid, it’s a comfort, and a challenge, to be reminded that cities are, when you come down to it, nothing more than their people.

Unoaku lives alone

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Watching Mika Rottenberg and Mahyad Tousi’s Remote for New Scientist, 26 October 2022

From her high-rise in a future Kuala Lumpur, where goods flow freely, drone-propelled, while people stay trapped in their apartments, Unoaku (in a brilliant, almost voiceless performance by Okwui Okpokwasili) ekes out her little life. There are herbs on her windowsill, and vegetables growing in hydroponic cabinets built into her wall. If she’s feeling lazy, a drone will deliver her a meal that she can simply drop, box and all, into boiling water. Unoaku’s is a world of edible packaging and smart architecture, living rugs (she spritzes them each day) and profound loneliness. Unoaku lives alone — and so does everybody else.

Though Remote was filmed during the Covid-19 lockdowns, it would be a mistake to consider this just another “lockdown movie”. Unoaku’s world is by no stretch a world in crisis, still less a dystopia. Her vibrantly decorated apartment (I want her wallpaper and so will you) is more refuge than prison, its walls moving to accommodate their occupant, giving Unoaku at least the illusion of space. Had it not been for Covid, we would probably be viewing this woman’s life as a relatively positive metaphor for what it would be like to embark on a long space journey. One imagines Lunar or Martian settlers of the future settling for much less.

Hers is, however, a little life: reduced to self-care, to hours spent gesturing at a blank wall (she’s an architect, working in VR), and to evenings sprawled in front of Eun-ji and Soju, a Korean dog-grooming show (Soju is the terrier, Eun-ji (Joony Kim) its ebullient owner).

Then things start to go very slightly wrong. Unoaku’s pan is returned dirty from the cleaning service. Eun-ji turns up drunk to her live show. Unoaku notices that the goofy clock on Eun-ji’s wall has started to run backwards. When she points this out on the chat platform running beside the programme, she triggers a stream of contempt from other viewers.

Unoaku is far more fragile that we thought. Now, when she leans out her window, bashing her cooking pan with a wooden spoon, celebrating — well, something; maybe just the fact of being alive and being able to hear other human beings — she is left shaking, her face wet with tears.

Soon other women are contacting her. They too have been watching Eun-ji and Soju. They too can see the clock going backwards on the dog-groomer’s wall. Bit by bit, a kind of community emerges.

Commissioned by the arts non-profit ArtAngel in the UK and a consortium of international galleries, Remote is that rare thing, an “art movie”. It belongs to a genre that became economically unviable with the advent of streaming and has been largely forgotten. (“Where are today’s Peter Greenaways and Derek Jarmans?” is a question that may not even compute for some readers, though these figures towered over the “arts & ents” pages of decades past.)

Director Mika Rottenberg, an artist working in upstate New York, is best known for her short, cryptic, funny video works like Sneeze (2012), in which well-dressed men with throbbing noses sneeze out live rabbits, steaks and lightbulbs. Her co-director Mahyad Tousi has a more mainstream screen background: he was the executive producer of CBS primetime comedy United States of Al and is currently writing a sci-fi adaptation of The Tales from a Thousand and One Nights.

One can’t expect this pair to revive the art movie overnight, of course, but Remote offers up an excellent argument for making the attempt. Like a modern Japanese or Korean short story, Remote explores the tiny bounds of an ordinary-seeming urban life, hemmed in by technology and consumption, and it surprises a world of deep feeling bubbling just beneath the surface.