Occupied City is Steve McQueen’s meditative essay on Amsterdam during Nazi occupation, with a running time of four hours and 22 minutes. There is no archive footage. There are no witness testimonies. It’s not The Sorrow and the Pity. It is not half-a-Shoah. Instead, this visits 130 addresses and details what happened there between 1940 and 1945 while showing the building or space as it is today. It should have its own power – what ghosts reside here? What was life like for the Jews who were deported from this square and perished at Auschwitz? – but I watched it from home via a link, as I had Covid, and after the first hour started to wonder: if I die will it be from the virus? Or the boredom?

After the first hour I started to wonder: if I die, will it be from Covid? Or the boredom?

McQueen has made some excellent narrative contributions to cinema and television – Hunger, Shame, 12 Years a Slave, the Small Axe anthology for the BBC – but he is also a Turner Prize-winning visual artist and this is more at the visual-art end of the spectrum. The full cut will, he has said, be 36 hours which I can imagine as an installation running on a loop in a museum so you can spend ten minutes in front of it and then move on. Ten minutes is probably all you need. It is based on the book, Atlas of An Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945, written by his wife, Bianca Stigter. The book is an encyclopaedia with each entry describing a different address where a family lived or a rally was held or a Jewish prisoner was forced to scrub floors with a toothbrush. This is that encyclopaedia, filmed. It was an endurance test, which I constantly failed.

It is narrated throughout by the Dutch-British actress Melanie Hyams who reads out every entry in a stony, affectless voice. The facts should speak for themselves, McQueen seems to be saying, but after one, two, three, four hours it just becomes numbing and repetitive. It opens with the hallway of a residential apartment, bathed in a golden light as the resident gets on with her day. Here, we are told, a Jewish publisher and his family committed suicide the moment the Dutch army surrendered to the Nazis. We hear about atrocity after atrocity – here’s the girls’ school that housed the secret police and became a site of torture; here’s the house where Jews in hiding were ratted on by their gentile neighbours – accompanied by modern footage that McQueen filmed between 2020 and 2022, during the pandemic. Often, after a site and what occurred there is described in detail, we’ll be told that the structure was ‘demolished’. So this building is not that building. If a point is being made I don’t know what it is.

Things aren’t presented in chronological order and if you are not acquainted with the city it’s impossible to work out how events might relate geographically. It’s also impossible to keep focused. I’d be watching a dog that had just been let off the lead in the park when I’d realise (guiltily) that I hadn’t been listening to the commentary. So I’d double down on listening to the commentary and then be unable to work out what I was looking at. It was as if the film was fighting itself. Meanwhile, McQueen is constantly seeking to make connections between the past and the present. He even, at various points, seems to be associating government lockdowns with life under a brutal occupation, which is as facile as it is offensive.

There is no interrogation or insight. At one point we are told: ‘The Netherlands lost 60,000 of its 80,000 Jewish inhabitants, the highest percentage in occupied countries.’ Lost? Like keys you’ve put down somewhere? Why not say they were ‘murdered’?  And why were more Dutch Jews murdered than those from France or Belgium? I felt, afterwards, that I still didn’t know what exactly had happened here.

There are moments of great beauty – a family sledging in the snow; teenagers entwined in the park; the woods at dusk – but it’s variable and some shots will put you in mind of Look North. A far better film is Stigter’s documentary Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2022), which examines three minutes of footage from a pre-war village in Poland before it was decimated by the Holocaust. It says more in its one hour running time than this does in what seems like days, and is currently available on multiple streaming platforms (including BBC iPlayer) – I’d direct you to that.