Funeral Parade of Roses

Friday, February 28 - Friday, February 21, 2025

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 Samuri 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.

Whether laughing with drunken businessmen, eating ice cream with her girlfriends, or fighting in the streets with a local girl gang, Peter’s ravishing Eddie is something to behold. “She has bad manners, all she knows is coquetry,” complains her rival Leda – but in fact, Eddie’s bad manners are simply being too gorgeous for this world.

“Few movies are as redolent of their times as FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES, a 1969 exemplar of Japanese countercultural ferment…its charms have scarcely wilted.” – J. Hoberman, The New York Times

  • Country Japan
  • Language Japanese with English subtitles
  • Year 1969
  • Running Time 105 minutes
  • Format DCP
  • Distributor Arbelos Films
  • Director Toshio Matsumoto
  • Cast Pita, Osamu Ogasawara, Yoshimi Jo, Koichi Nakamura, Flamenco Umeji
  • Accessibility Assistive Listening, T-Coil

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