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Toshio Matsumoto: Funeral Parade of Roses
26 Jun 2018
Pioneering experimental feature film Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), restored from the original 35mm negatives, screens in this two-part programme of the late-Toshio Matsumoto’s work (1932–2017). Set in Tokyo’s underground gay scene in the 1960s, Matsumoto’s disorientating counter-cultural narrative is part quasi-documentary, part fiction and unrestrained experiment. Matsumoto’s filmmaking career began in documentary, with several of his award winning films becoming increasingly experimental. Funeral Parade of Roses is Matsumoto’s first narrative feature and holds a unique place within post-war Japanese filmmaking. This underground classic of queer cinema follows the twisting tale of club hostess Eddie (played by the androgynous actor Peter), who is caught in a love-triangle with drag queen Leda (Osamu Ogasawara) and the club’s owner Gonda (Yoshio Tsuchiya).
The screening of Funeral Parade of Roses is accompanied by the event For the Damaged Right Eye: the short films of Toshio Matsumoto as part of a two-part programme featuring Matsumoto’s trailblazing work.
Funeral Parade of Roses, Dir. Toshio Matsumoto, Japan, 105 mins
Toshio Matsumoto (b. 1932, Nagoya, d. 2017, Tokyo) began his filmmaking career with the Shin-Riken Film Company before working on several avant-garde documentaries including The Weavers of Nishijin (1961) and Mothers (1967). Drawing on influences from pre- and post-war European avant-garde film, his experimentation with the documentary form earned him several awards for his visionary approaches to filmmaking. Breaking with the single channel film tradition, Matsumoto embarked on multi-projections in the hyper-sensory with For the Damaged Right Eye (1968), and later with the installation Space Projection Ako (1970) for the Textiles Pavilion at Expo ‘70 in Osaka, Japan. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Matsumoto continued to make three further feature-length films alongside a prolific number of experimental film and video works. Matsumoto’s subjects ranged from those of symbolism and iconography to landscape and architecture, through which he experimented with testing aesthetics and form and colliding tradition with global pop cultures and their inadvertent political tensions.
