‘As an artist, I’ve never felt more useful than now’: Steve McQueen on his monumental film screening in Amsterdam

Standing before the Rijksmuseum’s Neo-Gothic façade, film director Steve McQueen presents Amsterdam not as a postcard city, but as a layered palimpsest: a place where beauty and brutality coexist, where the mundane masks the monstrous. His 2023 documentary Occupied City is projected onto the museum’s exterior, a building long associated with the serene, ordered cityscapes of the Dutch Masters. McQueen, however, aims to peel back those layers, confronting the histories hidden beneath the city’s charming surface.

On this occasion, McQueen is screening a previously unseen 34-hour version of the film, a monumental project overlaying present-day Amsterdam with the memory of its Nazi occupation. Filmed over several years, it pairs patient, unhurried images of the city – streets, houses, squares, classrooms – with a voiceover drawn from his wife Bianca Stigter’s meticulously researched book, Atlas of an Occupied City, recounting what happened at these locations 80 years ago. Deportations, torture, denunciation: the past runs directly beneath the everyday.

Where once Amsterdam was captured by Vermeer’s delicate light or Gerrit Berckheyde’s ordered symmetry – images of calm domesticity and civic pride that masked contemporary turbulence – Occupied City shows the same streets today, with 21st-century residents going about their lives. McQueen highlights how deceptive the surface can be: a prison courtyard once used for parades is now a quiet plaza; the former Gestapo headquarters functions as a school. These settings appear banal, yet the histories they contain are anything but.

‘It has definitely changed my relationship to the city,’ McQueen says. ‘It’s made me fall in love with it more.’ As a filmmaker, he was granted rare access: ‘Doors were opened to me which will never be opened to others.’ Yet what lay behind them was often harrowing – classrooms where children now learn once echoed with screams; quiet houses were staging points for deportations; entire neighbourhoods carry the memory of betrayal. ‘Through this film, I could never not think about it. It never gets left behind when I exit my door.’

Occupied City functions as a catalogue of absence. The voiceover enumerates addresses, occupations, and atrocities, while the camera lingers on present-day life – dog walkers, cyclists, children spilling out of school gates. The tension is relentless: between what is visible and what is suppressed, between innocence and violence layered one atop the other.

McQueen insists the project is not only about the past. Premiering in a year that marks both Amsterdam’s 750th anniversary and 80 years since the Second World War’s end, the film feels unavoidably contemporary. ‘Art is one of those things where we have to think of the now,’ he says, citing events in Ukraine, Palestine, and Somalia. ‘To look at where we are now, what we’ve come through in the last 80 years, is testament to the idea of freedom. And we have to continue thinking of what it means. As an artist, I’ve never felt more useful than now.’

The Rijksmuseum’s walls, long home to paintings of everyday life and quiet labour, now host McQueen’s film: a reminder that ordinary spaces can conceal extraordinary brutality. To watch Occupied City here is to see Amsterdam as it is and as it was, a city living with its history in every brick and paving stone. McQueen’s achievement lies in making that doubleness visible, showing how the everyday deceives – and how, once revealed, cannot be unseen.

'Occupied City' will be screened until 12 January 2025, rijksmuseum.nl