Occupied City | Directed by Steve McQueen | Written by Bianca Stigter | 266 min | ▲▲▲▲△ | Digital and VOD
Blitz | Written and Directed by Steve McQueen | 120 min | ▲▲▲▲△ | AppleTV+
These films couldn’t be more different — an epic documentary and an old-fashioned war drama — but they share a focus on an era, helmed by visual artist and filmmaker McQueen, easily one of the most creative and dynamic filmmakers working today.
Occupied City uses the book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945, written by McQueen’s wife and creative collaborator, Bianca Stigter, as inspiration for a long form, meditative documentary. Refusing to utilize any archival footage or photography, McQueen shoots a present day Amsterdam while an actor reads details from Stigter’s book. It’s guided by city geography, taking us to the street addresses and telling us what took place in that location during the Nazi occupation. Occasionally, the building where these events happened has been demolished, but as the history of the place is revealed it eerily, virtually peels back scenes of the present day. The stories are violent, tragic, and appalling.
They’re told in capsules, brief and without much in the way of dramatic emphasis, before moving on to the next: dozens, then hundreds, stories of resistance, of murder, of disappearance, over four-and-a-half hours. This while we also get visions of the modern city managing the realities of Covid. The film is at times moving, but largely austere, observational, coolly detached, letting the audience take it all in.
Occupied City is an exercise of cognitive dissonance, seeing one thing and hearing something else, each element informing the other. In some ways it’s in conversation with a fictionalized work of some thematic overlap, The Zone Of Interest. Like that film, this documentary presents an uneasy disconnect between the aural and the visual storytelling, as well as the mundanity of some people’s lives and the suffering just out of view, hidden either by walls or by time.
McQueen’s documentary deals in the visible and invisible, but pays witness to the city as a living thing. The buildings that remain from the war are artifacts, and even when they’re gone, the stories stand in for them. Occupied City explores the psyche of place. The more sensitive in the audience might consider and compare what happened in this place with atrocities happening today. McQueen leaves it with us to make that connection.
The savage note of urban destruction opens his new film, Blitz. A residential house on fire, the heavy woosh of flame in our ears. Firefighters struggle to control a hose spewing water, to direct it at one of the burning buildings. This is the work of the German Luftwaffe, the bombing raids destroyed neighbourhoods through London between the fall of 1940 and spring of ’41, lots of them in the impoverished East End, and yet somehow missed the biggest bullseye on the map, St Paul’s Cathedral.
Rita (Saoirse Ronan) lives with her son, George (Elliott Heffernan), and father, Gerald (Paul Weller, formerly of The Jam and The Style Council, a man with a great, stony face and an undeniable coolth). Rita is concerned about her son’s safety given the nightly bombing, so sends him off with trainloads of other kids to the country. George doesn’t want to go, and just outside the city hops off the train and onto another one to bring him back, but it isn’t long before he’s lost in the city.
Blitz has an odd duality in its storytelling — George’s journey back to his mother sometimes feels like an episodic Boy’s Own adventure, a bit of fun and a lot of danger, but entirely an anachronism — a wholesome English tale of the past. For an unnecessary 10 minutes in the middle it almost becomes a Dickensian yarn when a gang of looters (including Kathy Burke and Stephen Graham) take advantage of his size for their dastardly deeds, but it’s still semi-wondrous as seen from George’s perspective. Even when it’s terrifying it’s beautiful, including a plane crash over the Thames, and a lovely segment featuring the magnetic Benjamin Clémentine (yet another actor/musician in the cast).
At the same time as George is off on his own, we get scenes from Rita’s life, past and present — the fate of George’s father, who is Black, her days working in a munitions factory, and her community’s fight to open up the Underground stations as air-raid shelters.
Connecting both parts of the story are a fantastic sense of time and place — rarely has a filmmaker recreated wartime London as convincingly. Blitz also features plenty of McQueen’s other preoccupations — racism in English society, as ugly and pervasive here as it was in his Small Axe series of films — and so much music. Characters sing to feel connected to each other, to celebrate culture, to share love in a family, to have a good time, and to unite the nation over its public airwaves.
I’ve heard my fellow criteratti suggest Blitz is McQueen’s most accessible and commercial film. While that might be true, I say: You can take the filmmaker out of the art house, but McQueen will always be an artist.
Blitz is a long way from the formalities of Occupied City, or the scalding intensity of 12 Years A Slave, Shame or even Widows, but it’s still a unique spectacle, full of undeniable idiosyncrasies, from interstitial moments of black and white daisy fields to abstract reflections of bombers on the ocean waves, to the choice of collaborator Hans Zimmer in full atonal percussive mode on the soundtrack.
