Holocaust cinema and the city: cartographical legacies in Iași and Amsterdam

This article asks what form documentary cinema’s ‘mapping impulse’ takes when its subject is that of Holocaust-era events in urban spaces. Focusing on the examples of Iași and Amsterdam, the article examines the connections between the different ways of depicting a city and its history in Romulus Balazs’s Souvenirs de Iași (2016) and Steve McQueen’s Occupied City (2023). The article analyses these documentary films and the sources on which they are based–archival materials and an atlas–to examine how cartography and cinema have the potential to inform each other. We ask how far these films follow the rival paradigms established by canonical documentaries, Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955) and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), and to what extent they set new, twenty-first-century standards and techniques. Our comparative approach to these Eastern and Western European locations, Romania and the Netherlands, illuminates the overlapping and diverging ways in which the Holocaust was enacted and has been remembered, as well as the construction and reimagination of urban identity in relation to this history, including post-war and, in Iași, post-socialist transformations.