THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
The thunderous debut into cinema by British artist and director Steve McQueen – Hungry (2008), Shame (2011), 12 Years a Slave (2013), a prelude to an angry work, sensitive to history and politics – makes the blunting of his notoriety suffered in recent years all the more noticeable. This is because, after a lackluster heist film in 2018 (The Widows), the director embarked on exciting projects, but not in line with the consolidation of a cinematographic career.
This was, in 2020, the miniseries Small Axe, broadcast on the small screen and devoted to the history of the West Indian community in the United States. Today it is a documentary of more than four hours – revealed at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023, provided that a film of this length can be seen there under the required conditions -, filmed in the city of Amsterdam between seizure of contemporary life and evocation of the tragic period of the Occupation. Three reasons emerge. The first is that the artist has taken up residence in the city. The second is that it is inspired here by the work Atlas of an Occupied City, by the historian Bianca Stigter, who is also his companion. The third is that the motif of war has always occupied a preponderant place in his artistic thinking.
Using the structure of the work, the director chooses one hundred and thirty addresses in Amsterdam, from which he traces an evocation of what took place there during the Occupation. No archives, no maintenance. Filming the first ones in the present, as well as their environment, he entrusts a female voice-over with the responsibility of this chronicle of the dark years, which recounts, with the very heavy price paid by the Dutch Jews (75% dead), the facts of collaboration and resistance, heroism and abjection specific to this period. Given the amount of historical and cinematographic work mobilized here, it may seem flippant to write off the value of such an effort with a stroke of a pen.
Conceptual intuition
However, we must say it as we mean it: Occupied City is a film which goes astray in the very conception of its project. Because the radical disjunction made between soundtrack and image soundtrack, which we suppose intends to bring back the shadows of the past into the present, is ineffective there. The tragedy of the facts listed in the first (stigma, deportation and assassination of Jews, bloody reprisals of the resistance, solidarity sacrifice of certain citizens, local collaborators, etc.) and the triviality of the images of contemporary reality (concert, sledding, demonstrations various, vaccinations against Covid-19, etc.) are ineptitude, even uneasiness, when the mention of the assassination of a group of people duly named at Auschwitz and a rave party or a outdoor tai chi chuan exercise.
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