BY SUSAN KOUGUELL FROM THE ARCHIVES
In a deeply personal conversation with Steve McQueen and Bianca Stigter we discussed the recurring themes of time, memory, and history in their respective work and in their collaboration on Occupied City, as well as breaking the rules of traditional documentary filmmaking.
About Occupied City: The past collides with our precarious present in Occupied City, informed by the book Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945) written by Bianca Stigter. McQueen creates two interlocking portraits: a door-to-door excavation of the Nazi occupation that still haunts his adopted city, and a vivid journey through the last years of pandemic and protest.
Steve McQueen is a British film director, film producer, screenwriter, and video artist. His film 12 Years A Slave received an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards and in 2016 the BFI Fellowship. McQueen’s critically acclaimed and award-winning films also include Hunger (2008), Shame (2011), Widows (2018) and the anthology series Small Axe. Past documentary works include the BAFTA-winning series Uprising (2021). For his work as a visual artist, McQueen was awarded with the Turner Prize, and he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2009. He has exhibited in major museums around the world. In 2020, McQueen was awarded a knighthood in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List for his services to the Arts.
Bianca Stigter is an historian and cultural critic. She writes for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad and published three books of essays. Stigter was an associate producer on 12 Years a Slave and Widows. In 2019 she published the book Atlas of an Occupied City. Amsterdam 1940-1945. In 2021 she directed the documentary Three Minutes – A Lengthening, which premiered in the Giornate degli Autori at the Venice Film Festival and was selected for the festivals of Telluride, Toronto, Sundance, as well as IDFA and DocA- viv. It won the 2022 Yad Vashem Award for cinematic excellence in a Holocaust related Documentary.
There is a haunting quality to Occupied City, hearing the emotionless voiceover text about the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam over images of contemporary life in Amsterdam. With encouragement from McQueen and Stigter I began this interview on a personal note, recounting when I saw the film at a recent press screening. Images of the neighborhood Apollolaan where my mother grew up, and the text about the Hunger Winter, the countless atrocities, including the many Jews forced into hiding, and the specific identification cards with the letter J stamped on it. My grandmother was among those in hiding, and she too had these documents, which I shared with McQueen and Stigter. I thanked them for allowing me the time to share this with them and expressed that this interview is not about my story, but about their film.
McQueen: It’s all of our stories. I don’t think you should leave yourself out of this interview; it would not be in service to your readers. It’s important to have this transparency. To be honest with you, it’s wonderful to add your experience into the interview because you’re a survivor of this situation.
Kouguell: Steve, in your interview with curator Donna DeSalvo in 2016 at the Whitney Museum, you discussed your installation piece End Credits about the Paul Robeson FBI files. The idea/theme of words being redacted, brought to mind not only the obvious government censorship but the idea of the literal erasure of history.
There is a thematic correlation between this work End Credits and Occupied City, and Bianca’s documentary: Three Minutes: A Lengthening Trailer. These works are historical investigations, which address the erasure of history, and the fragility of memory and time.
Stigler: What they also share is that you can find new forms to deal with the past and you don’t necessarily have to stick to the strictly well-known feature film or documentary genre, you can try to find a new way to convey history and the erasure of certain histories. And, also to make it more of an experience than a history lesson. There’s certainly common ground there.
McQueen: Both of us are very much about the audience and how things can sink in. With End Credits, it’s much more sculptural than Occupied City and Three Minutes, it’s for an art space due to the nature of its presentation.
