Steve McQueen is clear that stories about World War II must be told again and again. That “each generation has to address it and explore it anew.” Facing horror is the only solution to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Taking a look at the world, at Trump’s victory, at the bombings in Gaza or at the war in Ukraine, it would seem that not enough films have been made about it. Or, at least, it could be said that those that have been made have not struck the necessary chords with viewers.
That’s where a movie like The area of interest It resonated in such an important way. In Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel, the viewer was reflected in the daily life and boredom of a couple, a Nazi officer and his wife. What Glazer said, and made clear in his interviews and speeches, is that only if we saw ourselves reflected in the perpetrators could anything be changed. If we see World War II cinema as a simple melodramatic affair, where we only feel sorry for the suffering of the victim, it will be much more complicated.
Somehow Steve McQueen has considered something similar in blitz (which can now be seen on Apple TV+). He does it from a much more conventional film, which is told from the point of view of a child, but where the Nazis are always – or almost always – out of shot. What we see is the suffering of the London people during the bombings by Hitler’s army, but above all how within the population itself, even in those moments, racism and classism established first and second class citizens.
McQueen – who delivers a beautiful and exciting film – takes a hero’s journey with his little protagonist (a black boy with a white mother played by Saoirse Ronan), and breaks with several of the clichés of World War II cinema, always worried about the soldiers who fight and never about those who stayed at home. Also for granting a race and class consciousness to a gender that never has it. The epic and the heroic are always stripped of any complexity and analysis so that they are transversal to the entire population. Unfortunately it was not like that. The blacks, the Arabs… they were all also marginalized in the shelters and suffered discrimination when what there should have been was only solidarity.
That’s where it rises blitz, and where McQueen himself confesses that the heart of his film is, something he discovered by documenting himself and seeing that “what people of color were going through then is nothing new, unfortunately.” “In addition to fighting against enemies, we often end up fighting against ourselves,” points out the filmmaker about his most ambitious film in terms of budget and scale, but where some of the themes that were already in his filmography remain.
It is clear that for McQueen, telling the Second World War and building bridges with the present is an important issue. He did it in his four-hour documentary Occupied City, in which he spoke about the memory of cities, specifically Amsterdam, based on current scenarios and putting into context what happened in them during the war. Forgotten events that have left no mark on the streets or on the people.
I feel useful as an artist, especially at this time in the world, because I can contribute to making people look at the world again through the eyes of this child.
Steve McQueen
— Filmmaker
When asked directly about the links blitz With the present, McQueen makes it clear that what makes him think about what is happening in the world is that “we are very stupid and we don’t listen.” Of course, after the negative message he is quick to make it clear that “there is hope.” That is why his film emphasizes the wish that George makes, a wish that “is in our hands.” “We can change the narrative. We can change things. If it wasn’t like that I would have jumped off a bridge a long time ago. We all know that it is possible to understand each other, that there be reconciliation and peace, otherwise I don’t think it makes sense to move forward,” he adds.
That is why he justifies his last image, some black and white daisies that for the director are a symbol of that hope. “It is a nostalgic image, it is in black and white, but that nostalgia has to do with what has happened and what could happen. It is a dream, a wish that George’s wish becomes a reality,” he explains about that mysterious scene that is repeated in various moments of the film.
That optimism is transferred to how the director sees his work as a filmmaker. He has no problem admitting that he has done blitz because he feels “useful as an artist.” “Especially at this time in the world, I feel useful and I feel very fulfilled because I can contribute, with some luck and even in a small way, to having my hands behind the wheel a little and making people look at the world again through from the eyes of this child, because we were all children at some point and we were optimists at some point. I hope we still are,” he says and thus justifies his point of view, that of a child who is “the peak of optimism.” blitz He has also filmed it “as a father, as someone who has children and wants to clear the way for the future.”
One of the key decisions in World War II films is how to show brutality, a debate that always comes back to Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah, who believed that the dramatization of horror was a mistake. Something that Glazer also thought, who did not show any deaths in The area of interest. McQueen seems to accept that assumption, but also assures that he was not “afraid to show death.” I didn’t want to avoid showing it, but you can see that there is care in not making it explicit and in using it in a narrative way, like the scene in the Café de Paris, where George finds almost petrified dead people, in what McQueen describes as ” a kind of limbo” where George will see firsthand the death that the camera leaves out of frame. Staging decisions that show Steve McQueen’s commitment to what he tells and how he tells it.
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