Steve McQueen screens his 34-hour movie in Amsterdam – why now?

Standing earlier than the Rijksmuseum’s Neo-Gothic façade, movie director Steve McQueen presents Amsterdam not as a postcard metropolis, however as a layered palimpsest: a spot the place magnificence and brutality coexist, the place the mundane masks the monstrous. His 2023 documentary Occupied Metropolis is projected onto the museum’s exterior, a constructing lengthy related to the serene, ordered cityscapes of the Dutch Masters. McQueen, nevertheless, goals to peel again these layers, confronting the histories hidden beneath the town’s charming floor.

On this event, McQueen is screening a beforehand unseen 34-hour model of the movie, a monumental challenge overlaying present-day Amsterdam with the reminiscence of its Nazi occupation. Filmed over a number of years, it pairs affected person, unhurried photos of the town – streets, homes, squares, school rooms – with a voiceover drawn from his spouse Bianca Stigter’s meticulously researched guide, Atlas of an Occupied Metropolis, recounting what occurred at these places 80 years in the past. Deportations, torture, denunciation: the previous runs instantly beneath the on a regular basis.

The place as soon as Amsterdam was captured by Vermeer’s delicate mild or Gerrit Berckheyde’s ordered symmetry – photos of calm domesticity and civic delight that masked up to date turbulence – Occupied Metropolis exhibits the identical streets right this moment, with Twenty first-century residents going about their lives. McQueen highlights how misleading the floor might be: a jail courtyard as soon as used for parades is now a quiet plaza; the previous Gestapo headquarters capabilities as a college. These settings seem banal, but the histories they include are something however.

‘It has undoubtedly modified my relationship to the town,’ McQueen says. ‘It’s made me fall in love with it extra.’ As a filmmaker, he was granted uncommon entry: ‘Doorways had been opened to me which can by no means be opened to others.’ But what lay behind them was usually harrowing – school rooms the place youngsters now study as soon as echoed with screams; quiet homes had been staging factors for deportations; complete neighbourhoods carry the reminiscence of betrayal. ‘By way of this movie, I may by no means not give it some thought. It by no means will get left behind after I exit my door.’

Occupied Metropolis capabilities as a listing of absence. The voiceover enumerates addresses, occupations, and atrocities, whereas the digicam lingers on present-day life – canine walkers, cyclists, youngsters spilling out of faculty gates. The stress is relentless: between what’s seen and what’s suppressed, between innocence and violence layered one atop the opposite.

McQueen insists the challenge is just not solely in regards to the previous. Premiering in a yr that marks each Amsterdam’s 750th anniversary and 80 years for the reason that Second World Conflict’s finish, the movie feels unavoidably up to date. ‘Artwork is a kind of issues the place we’ve to consider the now,’ he says, citing occasions in Ukraine, Palestine, and Somalia. ‘To take a look at the place we are actually, what we’ve come by means of within the final 80 years, is testomony to the concept of freedom. And we’ve to proceed pondering of what it means. As an artist, I’ve by no means felt extra helpful than now.’

The Rijksmuseum’s partitions, lengthy dwelling to work of on a regular basis life and quiet labour, now host McQueen’s movie: a reminder that odd areas can conceal extraordinary brutality. To observe Occupied Metropolis right here is to see Amsterdam as it’s and because it was, a metropolis residing with its historical past in each brick and paving stone. McQueen’s achievement lies in making that doubleness seen, exhibiting how the on a regular basis deceives – and the way, as soon as revealed, can’t be unseen.

‘Occupied Metropolis’ can be screened till 12 January 2025, rijksmuseum.nl