New People: Funeral Parade Of Roses

This screening will take place at NEW PEOPLE CINEMA, located at 1746 Post Street in Japantown. Part of New People Cinema Club series One of the most subversive and intoxicating films of the late 1960s, director Toshio Matsumoto’s shattering, kaleidoscopic masterpiece: 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. 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 Shinnosuke Ikehata, whose stage name is Peter (from Kurosawa’s Ran), gives an astonishing performance as Eddie, hostess at Bar Genet — where she’s ignited a violent love-triangle with reigning drag queen Leda (Osamu Ogasawara) for the attention 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, 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. A key work of the Japanese New Wave and of queer cinema. Note films start right at the listed showtime. Discounted for members. All ticket sales are final.