Funeral Parade of Roses (Bara no sôretsu)

Sunday Showcase
Funeral Parade of Roses (Bara no sôretsu)

Directed by Toshio Matsumoto

Sunday, June 18, 1 pm 

Free

“A brash kaleidoscope of filmic possibility.” —Gary Goldstein, Los Angeles Times

Long unavailable in the U.S., Japanese director Toshio Matsumoto’s shattering, kaleidoscopic masterpiece is one of the most subversive and intoxicating films of the late 1960s: a headlong dive into a dazzling, unseen Tokyo night-world of drag queen bars and fabulous divas, fueled by booze, drugs, fuzz guitars, performance art, and black mascara. No less than Stanley Kubrick cited the film as a direct influence on his own dystopian classic A Clockwork Orange.

One of Japan’s leading experimental filmmakers, Matsumoto alters time here, freely mixing documentary interviews, Brechtian film-within-a-film asides, Oedipal premonitions of disaster, his own avant-garde shorts, and even on-screen cartoon balloons, into a dizzying whirl of image and sound. Featuring breathtaking black-and-white cinematography by Tatsuo Suzuki that rivals the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, the film offers a frank, openly erotic and unapologetic portrait of an underground community of Trans community.

A key work of the Japanese New Wave and of queer cinema, Funeral Parade of Roses was beautifully restored in 4K from the original 35mm camera negative and sound elements. 1969, Japan, DCP, in Japanese with English subtitles, 105 minutes. Recommended for 16+.

Co-presented with Queer Trans Asian American Pacific Islander Week sponsored by Crane House.