Funeral Parade of Roses

Funeral Parade of Roses (薔薇の葬列, Bara no Sōretsu) is a 1969 Japanese experimental film written and directed by Toshio Matsumoto. It is a loose adaptation of the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, set in the underground gay culture of 1960s Tokyo.^[1] Considered part of the Angura film movement, it combines elements of arthouse, documentary, and experimental filmmaking.^[2] The film centers 'gay-boy' Eddie, a young transgender woman working at a gay bar in Tokyo played by well-known Japanese gay entertainer Peter. The plot follows Eddie as she engages in a sexual relationship with the bar's owner, who promotes her as the lead girl of the establishment. According to Matsumoto, Funeral Parade of Roses is "in a way a film about filmmaking" and "a film about boundaries."^[3]

Funeral Parade of Roses
Japanese film poster
Directed by	Toshio Matsumoto
Written by	Toshio Matsumoto
Produced by	Mitsuru Kudo Keiko Machida
Starring	Peter Osamu Ogasawara Yoshio Tsuchiya Emiko Azuma
Cinematography	Tatsuo Suzuki
Edited by	Toshie Iwasa
Music by	Joji Yuasa
Production company	Matsumoto Productions
Distributed by	Art Theatre Guild
Release date	13 September 1969 (1969-09-13)
Running time	105 minutes
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese

Funeral Parade of Roses originates from the Japanese New Wave film movement, and is considered a monumental work of queer cinema. It is theorized to have influenced Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange.^[4] The film was released by ATG (Art Theatre Guild) on 13 September 1969 in Japan, but it did not receive a United States release until 29 October 1970.^[5] In June 2017, it received a 4K restoration and a limited theatrical re-release.^[6]

Plot

The film revolves around the underground gay scene in Tokyo.^[7] The main plot continuously jumps around the timeline of events. The film also contains scenes shot in a documentary style, in which the film's cast members are interviewed about their sexuality and gender identity.

As a child, Eddie was abused by her father. When her father abandons Eddie and her mother, Eddie suggests to her mother that, though her husband has left them, she still has Eddie to rely on, and her mother laughs at her. Some time later, Eddie finds her mother with another man, and Eddie stabs them both using a knife.

Now an adult, Eddie works at the Genet, a gay bar in Tokyo that employs several transgender women to service customers. The Genet is managed by drug dealer Gonda, with whom Leda, the madame or "lead girl" of the bar, lives and is in a relationship. Leda correctly begins to suspect that Eddie and Gonda have a secret sexual relationship, and Gonda promises to make Eddie the new madame of the bar.

One day, Eddie witnesses a street protest and enters an art exhibit, where a voice on a tape recorder speaks about individuals masking their personalities, "wearing" one or more "masks" in order to avoid loneliness.^[8] Eddie also goes shopping with friends, visiting clothing stores and a hair salon, eating ice cream and entering a men's bathroom, where they stand in front of urinals in their skirts. Eddie also associates with Guevara, a member of a filmmaking collective who makes avant-garde films. After viewing one of Guevara's works, Eddie and others smoke marijuana and dance, and Eddie continues to grow closer to Guevara, often contrasting Guevara's desire of self masculinity with her own desire of personal femininity.

While out with two friends, Eddie and two friends are confronted by a trio of women, and a fight ensues. Gonda visits Leda and is angered when she feigns concern for Eddie's well-being. Leda is later found lying in her bed, having committed suicide, wearing a veil and surrounded by roses. On the floor are two dolls, one with a nail in its upper chest, and the other with a nail in each eye.

After Leda's funeral, Eddie is promoted to madame of the Genet. While Eddie takes a shower, Gonda finds a book containing a photograph of Eddie as a young boy with her parents. Though a hole has been burnt through the face of Eddie's father in the picture, Gonda recognizes Eddie's mother as his former lover. Realizing that Eddie is his child, Gonda kills himself with a knife. Upon seeing this, Eddie takes the knife and stabs herself in each eye, before stumbling outside in front of a crowd of people.

Cast

• Peter as Eddie
• Osamu Ogasawara as Leda
• Yoshio Tsuchiya as Gonda
• Emiko Azuma as Eddie's mother
• Toyosaburo Uchiyama as Guevara
• Don Madrid as Tony
• Koichi Nakamura as Juju
• Chieko Kobayashi as Okei
• Shōtarō Akiyama as himself
• Kiyoshi Awazu as himself

Production

Development

Like many other underground filmmakers in Japan at the time, Matsumoto published written works theorizing potential new directions and aims for Japanese cinema.^[9] In 1958, Matsumoto published a manifesto calling for a new method of filmmaking, 'neo-documentarism', which would merge the styles of documentary film and the avant-garde.^[9] Crucial to the execution of this method was the exploration of interplay between the external political world and the internal world of the filmmaker.^[9]

Pre-Production

The majority of the characters were played by non-professional actors and members of the gay and crossdressing community.^[10] Peter was scouted to play the role of Eddie at a gay bar where he worked part-time.^[10] When the production team found Peter, Matsumoto had already auditioned 100 candidates.^[11]

Matsumoto took out a loan to finance the production of Funeral Parade.^[12] To raise the money to pay it back, he promised to work for Expo 70, at which he staged a special audio-visual event in the Textile Pavillion titled "Space Projection AKO."^[12] He chose to work outside film production companies so that he could more accurately execute on his original ideas and intentions for the film.^[12] He partnered with the Art Theatre Guild (ATG), which not only co-finances independent features, but also acts as distributor.^[12]

Filming

The film was set and shot in Tokyo. The crew shot guerilla-style when filming the performance group Zero Jigen in Shinjuku, because they did not have permission to shoot at the location.^[13] This entailed creating an escape plan in case police were present and deciding which staff members would allow police to catch them to ensure the others could get away.^[13] The opening of the film was shot at a location behind the Shinjuku Koma Theatre.^[13]

Specific characteristics of the film's cinematography are extreme close ups, positioning of mirrors during camera shifts (which blur the line between reality and reflection), and dynamic camera movements.^[14][15][13]

Post-Production

Matsumoto incorporated his first video artwork Magnetic Scramble into Funeral Parade, which showed television images of student protesters distorted with a magnetic coil.^[16] An abstract film sequence sourced from Matsumoto's short film Extasis (1969) also appears in Funeral Parade.^[17] Rapid cuts between disparate images and the layering of physical materials (paper, vinyl, glass, plastic, stone, plaster) contribute to the film's sensory affect.^[18]

The film includes inserted flashbacks, intertitles, street interviews, and interviews of cast members.^[19] During the climactic theatrical scene, the film cuts away to a shot of Yodogawa Chōgi, a well-known Japanese film critic and television commentator, who speaks to the camera in reaction to the scene's drama.^[20] In the published script of the film, this scene is described as "an imitation of television."^[20] Another instance of cinematic disclosure in the film is when Matsumoto appears, with the aim of "draw[ing] the conscious mind of the spectator to the world outside of the dramatic narrative."^[21]

Reception

Initial reception

Upon its release in Japan, critics had a mixed view of the film with some seeing it as overly superficial and failing to engage with the politics of the moment.^[22] That said, some believe the film's experimental aesthetics were inspirational enough to Stanley Kubrick in making his 1971 film A Clockwork Orange.^[23]

Retrospective assessments

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 100% of 22 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.5/10.^[24]

In 2017, IndieWire's Michael Nordine gave the film a grade of "A−", calling it "very much a trip, the kind you might not be able to make sense of at every step of the way but later, after returning to reality, will be glad to have embarked on."^[25] That same year, Simon Abrams of RogerEbert.com gave the film a score of four out of four stars, concluding: "You may not directly identify with Eddie or his [sic] world, but you will walk away from Matsumoto's film with a newfound appreciation of what movies can be."^[26] In 2020, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film five out of five stars, calling it "a fusillade of haunted images and traumatised glimpses, splattered across a realist melodrama of the Tokyo underground club scene, played out in a fiercely beautiful monochrome", as well as "a jagged shard of a film, an underground dream of longing and despair, an excursion away from narrative and a great example of the Japanese New Wave [...]".^[27]

In Corpses, Fools, and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema, authors Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay depict the film as a revolutionary moment in trans cinema. They describe it as "an incredibly exciting, refreshing, unforgettable film that is a record of its time and place, and that shows the radical potential of the trans film image, serving as metaphor, provocation, and object of desire all at once." It both played with and subverted "transploitation" films of its era.^[23]