{"id":3877,"date":"2024-01-31T09:42:33","date_gmt":"2024-01-31T09:42:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3877"},"modified":"2024-02-03T09:47:00","modified_gmt":"2024-02-03T09:47:00","slug":"a-snapshot-of-how-a-city-survives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3877","title":{"rendered":"A snapshot of how a city survives"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Watching Occupied City by Steve McQueen for New Scientist, 31 January 2024<\/a><\/p>\n

Artist and director Steve McQueen\u2019s 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\u2019s over-four-hour runtime. If you need to make a fast getaway, now\u2019s your chance — but I\u2019ll bet the farm that you\u2019ll return to your seat.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s monumental account of the city\u2019s wartime Nazi occupation.<\/p>\n

Narrator Melanie Hyams recites the book\u2019s 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\u2019s Jews. (60,000 of the city\u2019s 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 \u201cHunger Winter\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Though many of the buildings still stand, the word \u201cdemolished\u201d recurs again and again, and it\u2019s rare that McQueen\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

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\u2019s participation in the slave trade. But a city\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

Stigter\u2019s Atlas is an act of remembrance. Her husband\u2019s 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\u2019re encouraged to see that restrictions are restrictions and curfews are curfews, whoever imposes them, and whatever their motives. What\u2019s interesting is to see how people react to civil control, as it becomes (whether through necessity or not) increasingly heavy-handed.
\nAt a big anti-fascist rally, conducted outside the city\u2019s Concertgebouw concert hall, a speaker announces that \u201cDemocracy is more fragile then ever.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is it, though? Occupied City would suggest otherwise. It\u2019s a film full of ordinary people, eating, playing guitar (badly), playing videogames, smoking, sheltering from the rain, and walking dogs in the mist. It\u2019s a film about citizenry who survived one lethal onslaught now handling another one — not so obviously violent, perhaps, but pervasive and undoubtedly lethal.<\/p>\n

Occupied City is not about what people believe. It\u2019s about how they behave. And, lo and behold, people are mostly decent. Leave us alone, and we\u2019ll go tobogganing, or skating, or cycling, or dancing. We\u2019re civically minded by nature. The nightmares, the riots, the beating and betrayals — these only surface when you start putting us in boxes.<\/p>\n

A spirit of anarchism pervades this monumental movie. It\u2019s not anti-authoritarian, exactly; it\u2019s just not that interested in what authority thinks. Reeling as we are from the dislocations of Covid, it\u2019s a comfort, and a challenge, to be reminded that cities are, when you come down to it, nothing more than their people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watching Occupied City by Steve McQueen for New Scientist, 31 January 2024 Artist and director Steve McQueen\u2019s new documentary unfolds at a leisurely pace. Viewers will be glad of the 15-minute intermission baked into the footage, some two hours into … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,620],"tags":[613,863,1027,167,44,1055],"class_list":["post-3877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews-and-opinion","category-screen","tag-amsterdam","tag-civics","tag-covid","tag-documentary","tag-history","tag-second-world-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3877"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3878,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3877\/revisions\/3878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}