Unlocking the Frame: Queer Codes & Radical Cinema

Programme

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  Lesbian Visibility and the Art of Queer Coding in Dutch Cinema

  “There were no lesbian films in the Netherlands 50 years ago...”This is the refrain we often hear—and at first glance, a quick search in the Eye Filmmuseum’s database might seem to confirm it. But what if we look differently? Rewatching films for overlooked storylines, scouring underground festival leaflets, and tracing the footprints of queer initiatives already reveal the first clues.
  
  The rest is a treasure hunt: coded references to queer bars, nods to historical movements, and fleeting appearances of icons—details that straight audiences might miss, and queer viewers sometimes overlook. Through a few carefully chosen excerpts, we’ll see how these elements leap into focus once we set aside preconceived expectations of what story a film tells.
  
  The visibility of these films has always been fragile, shaped by the contexts in which they were shown and the platforms they could—or couldn’t—access. Alternative distribution networks, political collectives, film school experiments, and queer LGBT(I)Q+ series all played a role in bringing repressed stories to light. Between the mid-1970s and the late 1990s, the fight against established norms took many forms: some films slipped in minor queer characters, others relied on coding; activist documentaries and educational works became weapons, while a rare few mainstream productions dared to swap heterosexual couples for homosexual ones in otherwise conventional romances.
  
  What emerges from this patchwork is a resistance to easy categorization. The lesbian identities captured in Dutch cinema defy simple labels—just as they defied erasure. Starting from the Eye Filmmuseum’s collection, with its historical gaps and evolving priorities, we embrace the challenge: to sketch the contours of female homosexuality in Dutch film. Presentation by collection curator Lou Burkart.

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  Leonard Henny and the Legacy of ‘Films for Social Change’ 

  Following the recent donation of the paper archive of the late sociologist and filmmaker Leonard Henny, Eye Filmmuseum has initiated a project of research, repatriation and subsequent conservation of his scattered film legacy. The program will focus on the formative years in America, at the heart of the counterculture movement, from 1967 through 1971.
  
  Motivated by a deep belief in film as a tool for raising consciousness on social issues, Henny began making films of draft resisters, anti-Vietnam demonstrations and the Black Power movement, while later he focused more on producing and distributing radical films through “Films for Social Change (FSC)", a distribution collective he co-founded in 1969 for the promotion of ‘participatory protest films’.
  
  In his own words: ‘The main purpose of my films is to provide information on social problems from the point of view of people who are confronted with the problems, and who want to change them’. Henny saw his films as means to ‘stimulate constructive discussions on the issues of our time’.
  
  Looking back almost 50 years, it is hard to find traces left by FSC. By piecing together information found in his letters and archive, online sources and documents shared with us by the distribution collectives Canyon Cinema and The Film Makers Coop, we are able now to delve deeper into a forgotten but still relevant contribution to the history of militant cinema.
  
  The presentation will include the premiere of the new restoration of the film But What Do We Do?, an unusual take on the theme of anti-Vietnam war films, depicting the moral dilemma of engineers working for the war industry. Presentation by collection curator Simona Monizza and independent media historian and archivist Nico de Klerk.

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  Film: But What Do We Do? (16')

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  Film: Peace Pickets Arrested for Disturbing the Peace (7')