Queerama

Amazing doc!

Unusual presentation for a documentary. I had expected to see a film more like The Celluloid Closet. It was a long form music video with scenes from British cinema.

Came across this documentary unintentionally. Found it historical and interesting. Over halfway through I recognised a friend from the London scene from waaaaay back when.... so, I decided to pay closer attention to people in the club dancing clips....and near the very end....there I was right close up wearing a silver wig and a little gold framed mirror around my neck and a dummy cctv camera held upside down like a sci-fi laser gun. I remember it was a Kinky Gerlinky night back around 1991 and I think it was at The Empire Leicester Square. People REALLY made an effort in their costumes and designs for those Kinky Gerlinky nights. The guy filming had one of those huge dinosaur of a VHS camcorder up in my face...so I did a few moves..... Not realising 28 years later I would actually see myself on one of these programmes.

Oh dear...not as good as I expected it to be, considering the wonderful archive which has been made available. I found it a wee bit self indulgent...an extended music video with no narrative whatsoever. Nothing wrong with that, but it just doesn't add up to a cohesive film. Not to my taste, I'm afraid. What we need now is a conventional documentary along the lines of The Celluloid Closet which may be impossible in these LGBTQIA+ days.

absolutely love this documentary

A very quick comment to say A) this was a fantastically edited documentary on TV and I'm looking forward to seeing it again, great clips and soundtrack. B) Why is Amazon selling this new release for £19.99 when it is only £12.99 direct from the publishers (Bfi) website? Are Amazib bow relying on blind loyalty and taking advantage? I won't buy it here!

This film is a huge collage of clips of mainly older films, and part of the fun is recognising which films they are taken from, as there is no commentary. The juxtaposition is often imaginative, suggesting a sort of dialogue from different sources, sometimes. Although the film only lasts 70 minutes, it feels quite dense - a big collage with lots of different bits of paper. In the Q&A from the NFT the director Daisy Asquith says how they couldn't afford the full range of clips they wanted, but tried to make a virtue out of this - something they have definitely achieved, I think. The mixture of familiar and unfamiliar is very effective; as is the blend of overt material and b/w footage of people tiptoeing around the issue. All the sources are British, of course, being from the BFI archives. Some of the films - one featuring Richard Burton as a gay hairdresser with another straight star, which looks pretty bad even from the few seconds we see - are well worth just getting this much of. Another plus is the songs of John Grant, so touching in themselves, and here providing the right emotional context for these scenes - it makes the whole thing moving and threaded with desire from beginning to end. The extras are as long as the film itself, including two TV programmes from the 60s presented by Bryan Magee, one on gay men, and the following year (1965) another on lesbians - they make for very interesting viewing, the subjects are so articulate, and the kind of questioning sympathetic while also reflecting how strange gay lives seemed to most people - the frequent unquestioning use of the word 'normal', for instance.

The dvd did not disappoint. Interesting presentation, the extras were great.