Mcqueen Documentary Free

[Ailene Goldhirsh]

McQueenis a 2018 biographical documentary film, directed by Ian Bonhte, written and co-directed by Peter Ettedgui, and produced by Ian Bonhte, Andee Ryder, Nick Taussig, and Paul Van Carter under the banner of Misfits Entertainment, and Salon Pictures. The documentary is based on the life and career of British fashion designer Alexander McQueen.

On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 99% based on 126 reviews, with an average rating of 7.8/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "McQueen offers an intimate, well-sourced, and overall moving look at a young life and brilliant career that were tragically cut short."[2] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 84 out of 100, based on 28 critics, indicating "Universal acclaim".[5]

I had not anticipated that one of the more lively, funny, and challenging conversations I had all year would be in relation to a four-and-a-half-hour Holocaust documentary, but I found in McQueen and Stigter the kind of rigor that lends itself to good-natured combativeness. The transcript of the interview has been edited and condensed.

Bianca Stigter: It was great. Let's say the book is, on the face of it, one you would not expect to be made into a film or inspire a film. So when Steve told me about this idea, I thought, that's amazing, and that this can be a new way to deal with a historic subject matter that has not been done before, as far as I know. So I thought it was quite wonderful.

Steve McQueen: At first, when I wanted to make the picture, it wasn't about the book. It was about illuminating ghosts, because I felt I was living with ghosts [in Amsterdam]. The text was reverberating a past. I think what was exciting for me was to find it, more than anything else. It was one of those things which I was very grateful to have the time to do and try to get it right, because there was never a template for this. It was about finding it.

SM: Well, no, because the locations were the things, which was the thing that nailed us down to one place, of course: Bianca describing these addresses. Where they were informed it. But other than that, no, because it was a camera and a microphone and lenses. The challenge was how do you illuminate, how do you retrieve the past in the present, or at least look at the present again? Sometimes it's one of those things, just knowing where to put the camera. How do you tell the story?

AB: Warhol was reportedly an inspiration for some of your earliest work. I could see something in the observational endurance quality of this film that was reminiscent of his. I was wondering if that might have been a point of reference.

AB: I thought that what [the narrator] Melanie [Hyams] did was incredible in the film, and it's a shame that there's not an award for that type of performance. How did you cast her? How do you direct a performance like that, and how long did it take to record everything?

BS: It's also not a voice that speaks out of a position of authority. It's a voice that also just discovers what she's reading. So she's one step ahead of the audience. But for her as well, it's a kind of voyage of discovery.

SM: Well, I think they're very different takes. I think, obviously, our film is nonfiction, and it's showing how things are today and how things were then. They're very different approaches, other than the fact that both our film and that film look at that period. For me, one is a much more classical approach than the other.

AB: Was there any logic to the specific addresses and events that you chose to relate, and the order in which they're delivered? It's a film, so obviously there's a procession, there's a way that these things are presented and, I would assume, an intended effect.

SM: But it's a book that you don't read from cover to cover. If you're in Amsterdam, you dive into the book on your street, on your address, if you can find it. And then you move around to different places. So in some ways, it was about replicating that experience of meandering through the book.

AB: How do you think Occupied City fits alongside Hunger [2008], and Twelve Years a Slave [2013], and Small Axe [2020], and all of your work? Do you think that there's a theme that unites these films?

You're just searching and looking for some kind of understanding, and you're not necessarily going to get it, but at least you do something. At least you go waste some time before you pass. You get busy at least, because there is no meaning in the end of the day. You're trying to make sense of it all. And I think that's why making cinema, even looking at cinema, is a kind of religious experience. But you end up finding the more you know, the less you know.

AB: Steve, I had entirely forgotten that you shot a video with Kanye once. In light of his last few years, and this project, I was wondering how you felt about that collaboration now, and if you had any stories from working with him?

Covid plays an interesting role in the film. It's a throughline that's introduced five minutes in, and some of the more complicated early images are in conversation with Covid protests and the police response to it.

I think there is a literal reading of that juxtaposition that essentially positions a group of anti-Covid-restriction protesters, who are resisting public-safety protocols, as they are being kettled by the police, with the resistance to Nazism. How would you respond to that?

SM: No, because there's no voiceover on those protesters. We're going from the Rijksmuseum to the Concertgebouw. And by us moving at that time from the Rijksmuseum, we come across these protesters, and there's conflict with the police and so forth, that we move over. There's no indication of any kind of comparison to any kind of thing from that time in space other than the fact that [in] this time in space, people were protesting against the lockdown. It's like North Pole, South Pole.

SM: But I suppose it does tell you that people died and fought and died for freedom, and then you could do what the hell you want with it. People died and fought for kids, young children, to not even give a fuck about the Second World War. And that's well earned. People could do what they want.

There are fantasists out there who like to sort of compare things to things. But let's stick to the facts. People always try to make sense, and often or not, people make nonsense, but that's OK too. But the fact of the matter is, what's happening there is the liberty that people have earned through sacrifices. That's what happens.

SM: We're not going to give them any. People can link Swiss cheese to a computer. They could do whatever they want. But the fact of the matter, what's interesting about it, is that people are always trying to make sense out of things. But what we found out through our research of the Second World War is that the more you know, the less you know. It's just more complex than that, unfortunately. You try to make sense out of six million people being murdered. You can't make sense out of it.

BS: Yeah, well, of course. I think people will think about that when they see this movie. And there's just more atrocities that are incomprehensible to deal with. So if anything, it makes it more difficult to watch.

SM: And the reason why it's more difficult to watch is that it seems like things haven't moved on. We obviously seem not to have learned from the past, or we're incapable. I don't know. That's unfortunate. And that's why we always try to look for answers and the morality and whatnot. Then when you just find out, it's just more unfortunate. It's just more complex than that. The simplistic answers are not there because, again, even this subject, I'd rather not talk about it. Not because I don't want to talk about it, [but] because I feel that one has to come with solutions rather than just more rhetoric or more noise. What we want now is solutions, not just other people giving their opinions.

LEILA FADEL, HOST: The Academy Award-winning director Steve McQueen has a new film out in theaters this week called "Occupied City." It's a four-hour meditative documentary that provides two simultaneous portraits of Amsterdam - one, a journey through modern routine life - recent years of pandemic and protest - the other, a record of atrocities during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in the early 1940s.(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "OCCUPIED CITY")UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: In May 1940, Amsterdam was taken over by the Germans. Immediately they set the clock forward so it was the same time in Amsterdam as in Berlin. The weather report disappeared from the newspapers. It was now a military secret. All streetlights were turned off. Dutch organizations were Nazi-ified (ph) or forbidden. Soon the Nazis started to ban Jews from parks, pools, shops, cafes and schools - from all public life. Music by Jewish composers could no longer be played. In 1941, they started rounding people up. In 1942, the deportations began.FADEL: Earlier, I sat down with McQueen and his wife, the historian Bianca Stigter. She wrote "Atlas Of An Occupied City," the book that inspired this documentary. But Stigter says there are some key differences between the book and the film.BIANCA STIGTER: The film is more of a free wandering through the city, and the book is more - practically set up like a guide book.FADEL: The documentary is over four hours long, a runtime that McQueen adamantly defends.STEVE MCQUEEN: This couldn't be an hour and a half film. It needed that contemplation, needed meditations to sort of get into the psyche of the cinema experience, and that time was very important for us.FADEL: So this is a film that shows contemporary scenes of Amsterdam. There's not archival footage. It's narrated by a younger woman. Was there a purpose behind that choice? And help us understand what you were trying to convey.MCQUEEN: I think it was a voice of not that time. It was the voice of now. There's optimism in the person's voice, even though there was a dispassionate sort of description of what was going on. And that was because I didn't want to manipulate the audience. It was about the audience sort of bringing the information, receiving the information for the first time. So it was about that moment where it was not about her being sort of dictating a history lesson. It was about her telling you what was happening.FADEL: You shot part of the film during the COVID pandemic, and there is this juxtaposition at moments during the film where we see lockdowns in Amsterdam while listening to the narrator describe how Nazis used curfews to punish Jews during World War II. What were you trying to tell us with that juxtaposition?MCQUEEN: It's about what happened here. It's - this is a meditation of what happened here in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. These things happened unfortunately. OK? So we're living now, and we're living with the evidence and the proof of what happened.FADEL: You hear these horrific bits of information about what happened, and you see these contemporary scenes of life going on. There is this powerful disconnect with the information that I'm hearing from the narrator and the images that I'm seeing.MCQUEEN: People have died and fought, fought and died for freedom and the freedom for people to do what they want. And these so-called horrible things happen, yes, but it was to do with war. And in war, horrible things happen. But now, you know, there's peace in Europe for now. Well, some parts of Europe, there's peace. You know, it would have been a different world had the Nazis had won the war, the Second World War.STIGTER: The film in that way is very open and the texts you hear are very factual. So we are not telling you what to think. You can try to make a connection between what you hear about the past and what you see now or not. That is open to each individual viewer.FADEL: You live in Amsterdam now. Do you feel that the city, that the citizens of Amsterdam, have a sense of this past that you are conveying here in the film?MCQUEEN: Some do and some don't. I mean, just like slavery in America - some people have an understanding of it, some people don't. I mean, it's like anything, you know. Some people do, some people don't. I mean, last time Bianca and myself were in Washington, we stumbled across where - well, there was no marking then - there was this - where sort of the Solomon Northup slave pen was and where - his hotel where he was kidnapped in Washington. So, yeah, these things are there. And, you know, they're there. It's like - and as I said before, like when I came to Amsterdam in a real way, I thought that I was living with ghosts. So what "Occupied City" is about is illuminating that past. When you go to the movies, people try to connect. They try to connect the dots and try to make sense of things. But what you - lessons learned from this situation is nothing makes sense. Because you how can you even fathom or sort of get to an understanding of how, for example, you know, during this war, 6 million people, Jewish people and Roma and gay people died. Try and make sense of that.STIGTER: This kind of pondering is what the movie makes you do. How do you connect the past...MCQUEEN: How do you make sense out of it? Yeah.STIGTER: ...And the present? Can you make sense out of it, or do you have to conclude that a lot of times, you cannot make sense of it? When you hear all the stories, at a certain moment you realize, hey, there's people from the past that we only see, if you see them, in pictures - it's in black and white and very grainy and looks very old - not our concern. And here you realize, but those people are us. They also lived in a world full of color and emotions. And this movie is also a mirror in that sense.FADEL: Do you want viewers to take a message away from the film?MCQUEEN: The message is that the Nazis didn't win, and there's this new generation of Jewish people who are thriving and living in Amsterdam. That's what the end of the movie is, obviously.STIGTER: It's not a movie that spells it out in every minute. We give you the facts, and then it's also up to you to make up your own mind.MCQUEEN: Yeah.STIGTER: It's not a film wagging a finger at you.MCQUEEN: Far from it.STIGTER: It's a film that I hope will make you think for yourself.MCQUEEN: Yeah. Exactly. It's not a history lesson, you know? There's tons of books that you can have and people know about, but again, it's about a meditation, a journey, if you will. And it's one of those situations where you - the responsibility is on you as a viewer, as a different way of looking at it as a narrative. It has to be, because otherwise you're just doing the same thing all over again.FADEL: That was director Steve McQueen, along with his wife, the writer and historian Bianca Stigter. The film, "Occupied City," is out in theaters this week.

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