“Funeral Parade of Roses” – A film screening in partnership with Monoform Cinema

Welcome to an unapologetically queer and dizzying pop-art fantasia that evades categorization. Through a rapid-fire combination of melodrama, comedy, horror, documentary and experimental film, director Toshio Matsumoto’s freewheeling approach to both genre and form results in a film that gleefully disorientates without ever feeling disjointed. Made at a point in cinema history when radically-minded filmmakers were testing, breaking and redefining the limits of good filmmaking and taste, Matsumoto’s movie attacks on both fronts with an irrepressible fervor, creating a film that has retained its power to surprise, delight and shock 55 years later. An unknown club dancer at the time, trans actor Peter (from Kurosawa’s Ran) gives an astonishing Edie Sedgwick/Warhol superstar-like performance as 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 (Yoshio Tsuchiya, from Seven Samurai and Yojimbo). Director Toshio Matsumoto’s shattering, kaleidoscopic masterpiece is a key work of the Japanese New Wave and of queer cinema, and one of the most subversive and intoxicating films of the late 1960s.