Toshio Matsumoto: Double Exposure

Friday, February 21 - Saturday, March 1, 2025

“I am a wound and a sword, a victim and an executioner.”

–

“O fetus, O fetus
Why do you undulate?
Is it the knowing of
Your mother’s heart
That fills you with dread?”

As the projector whirs away, undulating with celluloid nightmares, the rallying cries of workers and students can be heard in the streets outside. Close to our present as this may seem, this is from Toshio Matsumoto’s groundbreaking feature: Funeral Parade of Roses (1969). Capturing the rapturous counter-cultural zeitgeist of late-60s Tokyo, director Matsumoto’s radical docu-fiction pseudo-hybrid follows Eddie, a trans sex worker navigating the underground queer scene of Shinjuku, and stands as one of the defining works of the eminent independent production and distribution outfit, the Art Theatre Guild (ATG). Breathlessly cool and brimming with formal daring, Funeral is presented alongside Matsumoto’s later Dogra Magra (1988), an equally experimental, mandalic tale of madness based on a novel by Shōwa era author, Yumeno Kyūsaku, about a troubled young man locked in an asylum for killing his bride-to-be without an apparent motive—or so he’s led to believe by the eccentric doctors keeping him captive.

-Kylie Pletcher, IFC Center Projectionist

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