Friday 9 February sees the UK release of Occupied City, a four-hour-plus documentary by the British director Steve McQueen, who in 2014 became the first Black film-maker to win an Oscar for best picture. As director and producer of 12 Years a Slave, McQueen (who was knighted in 2020) established himself as a pioneer of modern cinema. Yet as he demonstrates with Occupied City, which juxtaposes chillingly factual narration about Nazi atrocities in German-occupied Amsterdam with modern-day images of the city, he has never turned his back on his roots in visual art. Indeed, McQueen’s latest, based on his partner/co-producer Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945, owes as much to the traditions of provocative video installations as to narrative drama.
I first met McQueen in 2008, after he won the Cannes Caméra d’Or for his debut feature film, Hunger. I asked whether he considered himself primarily an artist who made films, or a film-maker who made art. My question was prompted by the fact that, long before the film accolades started rolling in, McQueen, who has made his home in London and Amsterdam, was a Turner prize-winning artist, beating media darling Tracey Emin to the award back in 1999. “I don’t see myself as anything,” McQueen replied. “I just do stuff. It’s all the same to me – art or film. I don’t see any difference, or any divide.”
Throughout his career, McQueen has straddled the boundaries between screen disciplines. His fourth feature film, Widows (2018), was a cinematic reinterpretation of a popular Lynda La Plante TV series from the 80s, while in 2020 the BFI London film festival opened with Mangrove (BBC iPlayer), the first instalment of McQueen’s five-part Small Axe project, which was made for the BBC and thus technically “television”. Yet in McQueen’s hands such distinctions seem redundant. “It’s all about the idea rather than the medium,” he told me. “It’s not about a big camera, or a small camera, or a paintbrush. It’s just about the idea.”
McQueen’s entire body of work forms a conversation between cinema and its adjacent art forms. “When I was in art school,” he remembered, “I wanted to be in film school. When I was in film school, I wanted to be in art school.” His early installations included Deadpan (1997), a short that recreated the famous stunt from the 1928 comedy Steamboat Bill Jr: the front facade of a house falling on a lone figure (first, Buster Keaton, then McQueen), who is saved from being crushed by standing in the precise location of an open window. In 2004 he teamed up with movie legend Charlotte Rampling to produce an experimental art piece in which we see his finger prodding her eye in extreme closeup. “It’s a piece about resistance to aggression,” said Rampling, who would later describe Hunger as being “in between a video installation and a film”.
When I first interviewed McQueen, our conversation flitted back and forth between discussion of his feature film work and a recent artwork entitled Queen and Country, which had grown out of a commission by the Imperial War Museum to represent the British armed forces in Iraq. McQueen had fashioned a coffin-shaped oak box containing a series of postage stamps commemorating the fallen. “I was paying my taxes and putting a stamp on the envelope,” he explained, “and I thought: ‘Stamps. Soldiers. War letters.’ What I’m trying to do is to enter people’s psyche in a way which doesn’t come through the media, but is much more everyday and tangible. So in some ways, it was the whole idea of [stamps] going through the bloodstream of the country.” When McQueen approached Royal Mail about issuing these stamps for general use, its refusal provoked a public discussion about the intersection between art and war – fabrication and reality.
As for Hunger, scenes from which evoked images of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay (“It is about 1981, but it’s also about now,” McQueen told me), it contains a lengthy exchange between Liam Cunningham’s Father Dominic Moran and Michael Fassbender’s hunger striker Bobby Sands, in which the priest tries to talk the prisoner out of starving himself to death. Presented in an audaciously unedited single take – something McQueen explored in early art installations – the scene is designed to overturn the traditional shot/reverse-shot format of cinema, in which each speaker effectively talks to the camera, to the audience. Instead, McQueen presents his audience with a more theatrical proscenium frame that forces them to watch and listen to an intimate conversation between two people. “And they know that, on some level, they’re not supposed to be there. So they lean in more; they listen more carefully. And everything gets sharper.”
“We’re not bad people,” Carey Mulligan’s Sissy says to Brandon (Fassbender) in Shame, McQueen and screenwriter Abi Morgan’s simmeringly powerful 2011 study of sex addiction. “We just come from a bad place.” When I asked McQueen what this line means, he replied: “People bring their own history to the cinema, their own baggage. And I think it’s much more exciting for them, and much closer for them, to use that, rather than have everything explained.” That sense of engagement – of the audience completing the picture – is central to all McQueen’s work, in whatever medium. His next film, Blitz, delves once again into the shared history of the second world war. As with all of his work, I can’t wait to experience it and to become a part of it.
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What else I’m enjoying
Screen Deep
Subtitled How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World, this is a brilliantly readable and insightful book from my colleague Ellen E Jones, one of our finest film and TV journalists.
True Detective: Night Country
Having never watched an episode of True Detective, I came to this fourth season for Jodie Foster but stayed for the weird Twin Peaks/X-Files-on-ice vibe.
The Holdovers
Alexander Payne’s 70s-set tragicomedy is a joy; a film that looks like it was made in the era in which it’s set, with awards-worthy performances from Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph. Despite being bizarrely released in the UK in January, this is set to become a future Christmas classic.
