Occupied City (2023, Steve McQueen) (Patreon)

69/100

Plenty of precedents here—in one sense, this is just Shoah stripped of all its interviews, four hours of uninflected interstitial present-day location shots—but most salient for me is The Falls, Peter Greenaway's epic cataloguing of what's called the Violent Unknown Event. Bianca Stigter did more or less the same for a Violent Known Event, and Occupied City's warm yet methodically unsentimental voiceover narration, performed in English by Melanie Hyams (apparently Carice van Houten recorded the Dutch version), creates a similar, productively numbing effect. More than a hundred entries, each beginning with the precise street address, briefly relating what occurred in that spot during the Nazi occupation, frequently concluding with a curt "Demolished." (Meaning the building, though often the lives within it, too.) McQueen—who I did not learn is married to Stigter until afterward; nor did I know, or would I ever have guessed, that this installation-esque film is technically a literary adaptation—anyway, McQueen largely eschews the unblinking Lanzmann-style views that one might expect for this sober context, finding a striking selection of camera angles for every address, constantly seeking out quotidian slices of life in Amsterdam as it's currently occupied (double meaning!), engineering a disquieting contrast between word and image. You can really see, more than in his narrative features, that he started out as an avant-garde guy; the camera executes Noé-crazy 360° rotations at one point, and there's a hefty structuralist element, so that e.g. we spend some time staring through a bus' windshield (we can surmise, if only from the rear-view mirror's position) at what looks like a random hunk of steel and masonry, which eventually lowers to reveal itself as the underside of a bridge, exposing the road beyond. 

I got a bit worried early on by the inclusion of anti-lockdown protests—is McQueen equating Covid restrictions and vaccine mandates with fascism? or is he mocking the protestors via that absurd comparison?—but ultimately detect no editorializing in either direction; seems as if he simply acknowledges what was going on at the time this film was shot (over several years). The pandemic-heavy imagery doesn't last long, and when street marches show up again in the final minutes, they're about climate change. My main reservation echoes the one I've always had about The Falls: Does it really need to be that damn long? (Though McQueen claims to have shot enough footage for 36 hours of this, so I guess we got off pretty light.) Unlike some folks of my acquaintance, I never got weary of Occuped City—for me, McQueen's skill at assembling a city symphony precludes boredom—but you could chop out 90 minutes or more without doing the work any real harm, and the film stops more than it properly ends. Still, I'd been kinda dreading this, based just on "four-hour Holocaust doc," and am happy to have gotten a bona fide art film instead. Albeit one that made me aware of how many Dutch Jewish families immediately committed suicide on 15 May 1940, when the Dutch government surrendered and went into exile. It's so, so many. 

(Cheerier fun fact: Midway through one entry, I recognized it as the source for an obscure docudrama that I reviewed for the A.V. Club, The Last Vermeer, starring Guy Pearce, Claes Bang and Vicky Krieps. Not a very good movie, but a pretty amazing true story.)

((Oh, and this is how whoever close-captioned Occupied City chose to describe Bob Marley's "Is This Love."))