Occupied City shows the reductio ad absurdum of mimetically screening genocide and war. It is adapted from the book entitled Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945 by Bianca Stigter. A cinematic voiceover recounts occupation stories from the book while the camera visually pans over absent and hollowed out spaces.

The film crosscuts from obliterated scenes of the city under Nazi occupation to people protesting during the pandemic. Unresolved crimes of war drift across time as an absent presence. These scenes explore the spread of group think that thrives under increasing societal repression.

McQueen makes a filmic tableau of the claustrophobia, fervor, and uncanniness of Amsterdam, which is also the city he calls home. He uses a meandering camera to witness the empty spaces that are material traces of the Nazi occupation today. Accounts of past disavowal, courage, and denial intertwine with the present as a cinematic haunting that punctures collective delusions.

Zone of Interest critiques the uncanny normality of the Höss family living beside Auschwitz and leading a so-called normal life.

It concerns the plotless daily life of a normal German family, growing up cooking and sewing and gardening, just beside the gas chambers and crematoria. The film ends in Auschwitz today, the museum it has become, and asks questions about how we live alongside horror and what we do with that horror. Various meanings of Zone(s) will be examined in literature—Martin Amis, Primo Levi and Giorgio Agamben— and film.

This presentation will echo the filmic experience of excess ardor or apathy which arises in the aftermath of war, occupation, or information overload.

It will be a visual presentation of scenes from both war films, highlighting how they show social memory and its erasure. My contribution will include clips that convey the irony, absence, or drift that is a residue of the way both films show war violence. As a montage presentation, it will depict how these films convey a real beyond symbolic framing, closure, or naming.