Steve McQueen’s postmodern ghost story, “Occupied City,” which lasts for a duration of four and a half hours, challenges our understanding of how movies convey meaning. The film takes a pointillist approach in recounting history. Based on a book by McQueen’s wife, Bianca Stigter, a Dutch filmmaker and historian who also produced the remarkable nonfiction film “Three Minutes: A Lengthening” about the Holocaust, “Occupied City” showcases hundreds of mostly static shots of Amsterdam during the pandemic lockdown. Accompanied by an impassive narrator (Melanie Hyams), each shot is detailed with the corresponding crimes that occurred in each location during the Nazi occupation in the early 1940s.
The concept may seem intentionally repetitive, but its straightforward and matter-of-fact approach diverges from the usual narratives that aim to evoke empathy. Throughout the film’s numerous enumerations, my mind often wandered, evoking both guilt and a sense of perspective. It becomes distressingly easy to forget or lose focus when faced with the incomprehensible magnitude of the horrors that the human brain struggles to fully comprehend.
Every year, I make it a point to watch some films from the Revivals section, which showcases restored vintage titles that were previously inaccessible. “Un rêve plus long que la nuit” (A Dream Longer Than the Night) by French American artist Niki de Saint Phalle particularly stood out. I had visited a de Saint Phalle exhibition years ago, where one of the most striking pieces was a door-sized vaginal opening nestled between a colossal pair of legs. Silly, beautiful, and simultaneously terrifying, the film presents a pagan fever-dream that envisions a feminist revolution through the perspective of a young girl. Its greatest qualities lie in the intricacies: the astonishing diversity of papîer-mache penises.
Also part of the Revivals section is a selection of shorts by Man Ray, best known for his photography but whose films transform familiar objects into unfamiliar entities through dizzying experiments with light and movement. Man Ray viewed conventional photography as a means of capturing reality, resulting in images that only exist in fantasies and dreams. In the era of the internet, where artists have access to increasingly advanced film technologies, it is worth appreciating films that share similar ambitions in making the unreal comprehensible. In “The Human Surge 3,” director Eduardo Williams employs a 360-degree camera to capture the wanderings of a multicultural group of friends from different parts of the world such as Peru, Taiwan, and Sri Lanka. Using uncanny, elongated images reminiscent of those on Google Earth, Williams presents a remarkable vision of digital interconnectedness that transcends borders and language barriers in a mesmerizing and psychedelic manner.