Something to watch tonight: Thursday 3 October

Occupied City (McQueen, 2023)

Thirty years ago I saw a film at the New Zealand International Film Festival that changed things for me forever.

Patrick Keiller’s London was like nothing that I had ever experienced before. A fictionalised essay about a place I thought I already knew well – I grew up in London – it married fixed camera shots of the city and its details with a single narrator’s voiceover. Paul Scofield provided the voice, playing an unnamed character who was following a friend, and former lover, named Robinson on a quixotic journey across London, looking for literary landmarks and referencing the recent re-election of John Major as prime minister.

It was erudite and illuminating, wryly amusing and often show-stoppingly insightful. I hadn’t realised that you could make films like this.

On the surface, it seemed so simple. Plant your camera, film something, then go away and edit all that footage into a story. But, of course, like all other kinds of filmmaking, you have to have an eye, and you have to have something to say.

I came to learn that this kind of storytelling was known as psycho-geography – understanding people through their places – and I was so taken with it that I even tried to use the form in some feature articles when I edited Wellington’s FishHead magazine.

Keiller made two more brilliant Robinson films – Robinson in Space and Robinson in Ruins – and there is another superb example of the form in Los Angeles Plays Itself which I recommended here back in the early days.

Here’s a clip from Robinson in Space (1997), dedicated to my parents who will be familiar with some of the locations:

Anyway, I’m unable to do a proper recommendation for these Patrick Keiller films as none are available via streaming in New Zealand but all three are still on disc at Aro Street Video.

Using a similar aesthetic – although with a much heavier heart – Steve McQueen has produced a portrait of his adopted city of Amsterdam in Occupied City.

Written by his wife, Bianca Stigter, the film shoots the modern day city while a dispassionate voiceover recounts the World War II horrors that occurred at those places – the families that were deported to camps, the resistance fighters who were betrayed, the children in hiding who starved.

I hate the word “juxtaposition” because it is an ugly word not because it doesn’t do a job for us, and this is a film of juxtapositions. Sometimes McQueen ventures inside these homes and we see ordinary Dutch people going about their lives. Sometimes, we just focus on a street frontage. Often, we see modern Netherlands struggling, as we all did, with Covid and vaccine denialism. Or young people just drinking in a park.

But everywhere we go, there are the scars of the Holocaust, some buried deep in the city’s psyche, some still visible in the architecture, in the streetscapes.

It’s a superb film about how the past is never really the past. It remains physically present if we choose to look for it, despite all the layers, all the patina, that grow over the top of it.

And that these atrocities were done by human beings, human beings just like the ones crashing their bikes into strangers at a tram stop, or getting civil-unioned in a building that once housed Nazi bureaucracy, or playing pétanque in the park.

Occupied City is one of the great documentaries of the decade and, while it is a confronting watch at times, it is a desperately important one.

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Where to watch Occupied City