In one of the few times Harvard's historic Norton Lectures are delivered by a filmmaker, internationally renowned British filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen (b. 1969) has been appointed Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry and his talks continue this spring at Sanders Theatre. On January 28, Lecture Four will focus on his works titled Occupied City, both a projected artwork and the epic film which will screen at the HFA prior to the talk. For information on the Norton Lectures and the full schedule, visit the Mahindra Humanities Center's website. 

WWII atrocity and 2020s city life overlap in Steve McQueen’s four-hour portrait of Amsterdam under German occupation. Adapted from historian-filmmaker Bianca Stigter’s 600-page Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945, the film maps 130 addresses significant in Mokum’s wartime past—government buildings, Jewish hiding places, a girls’ school-turned-SS headquarters, squares, theaters and deportation centers. Melanie Hyams’ affectless narration chronicles Nazi horror over images shot in the Dutch capital during and immediately after Covid-19 lockdowns. In place of explanation, McQueen’s 35mm camera insists on the importance of looking closely at architectural loci in which history and the Holocaust are irrevocably inscribed, even (and especially) when the scars of violence are invisible to the naked eye. A rigorous and demanding research-intensive feat, Occupied City is not an ode or symphony to Amsterdam as a site of resistance so much as a reactivation of cinema’s singular power to collide times, spaces and perspectives into an out-of-joint totality. Harrowing and energizing in equal measure, the film ultimately works as a reminder of our political responsibility to generations past, present and those yet to come. – Nace Zavrl