FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES [BLU-RAY]

Details

• Release Year: 1969
• Genre: Drama
• Plot: A key work of the Japanese New Wave and of queer cinema, 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. An unknown club dancer at the time, transgender actor Peter (from Kurosawa’s RAN) gives an astonishing Edie Sedgwick/Warhol superstar-like performance as hot young thing Eddie, hostess at Bar Genet — where she’s ignited a violent love-triangle with reigning drag queen Leda (Osamu Ogasawara) for the attentions of club owner Gonda (played by Kurosawa regular Yoshio Tsuchiya, from SEVEN SAMURAI and YOJIMBO). One of Japan’s leading experimental filmmakers, Matsumoto bends and distorts time here like Resnais in LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, 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 + sound. Featuring breathtaking black-and-white cinematography by Tatsuo Suzuki that rivals the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, FUNERAL PARADE offers a frank, openly erotic and unapologetic portrait of an underground community.
• Cast: Pîtâ, Osamu Ogasawara, Yoshimi Jô, Koichi Nakamura, Flamenco Umeji, Saako Oota, Tarô Manji, Toyosaburo Uchiyama, Mikio Shibayama, Wataru Hikonagi, Fuchisumi Gomi, Chieko Kobayashi, Yô Satô, Keiichi Takenaga, Toshio Matsumoto
• Director: Toshio Matsumoto
• Runtime: 1:47
• Company: Art Theatre Guild, Matsumoto Production Company, Cinelicious Pics
• Media Format: Movie