Queer
Original Title
Flikker- Director: Rob de Vries; Arthur Bueno
- Producer: Arthur Bueno
CGiii Comment
Who the hell is Rob de Vries? A filmmaker of unknown films!
An amateur documentarian...of a radical movement!
This is an interesting film...only if you are interested in Dutch LGBT history...or, if social anthropology grabs you by the short and curlies...then, revel in the madness.
Watching this, you would be forgiven in thinking that being gay then...being a subversive...involved the donning of a dress, plastering on the make-up and taking to the streets!
It's all very Cockette-ish, it's all very passé and, perhaps, a little too self-important...afterall, this was a tiny representation of a bigger, more important movement!
Watch...
Queer (Flikker) from arthur bueno on Vimeo.
The(ir) Blurb...
The footage that makes up the documentary "Queer" is drawn entirely from 8mm films by the Rotterdam-based amateur filmmaker Rob de Vries. It is an ode to the medium of amateur film, a chronicle of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and a lively biography. But, above all, it is an intimate portrait of Holland's radical gay movement, for which de Vries was the "resident filmmaker".
From the moment that de Vries came out, homosexuality played a role in all his films. Rob de Vries was the only filmmaker to document the Dutch fight for gay liberation from within the movement.
After some thirty years, these images have literally come out of the closet. De Vries watches them again for the first time, together with the audience, and provides a cheerful commentary that carries us along a winding road of home movies, reportage, video diary avant la lettre, and hilarious fiction. The images bear witness to the joy, freedom, honesty and lack of pretension typical of the period and also to the sunny mentality of the man behind the camera.
Filmmaker Arthur Bueno asked de Vries to tell the stories behind the images and wove the text and images into a free compilation. It affords a rare glimpse of a colourful world, which feels like an intimate evening at home watching movies with the curtains closed.