Bara no Sōretsu (薔薇の葬列) - Funeral Parade of Roses 1969
Queer cinema has existed virtually as long as cinema has existed, but it has been forced to exist either as a subtext of the work, or as a small independent production that traverses underground networks of avid filmgoers. This was especially common in markets that didn't need to compete directly with the monolithic Hollywood system.
One of these underground films was Toshio Matsumoto's 1969 film Funeral Parade of Roses. Which has a more conventional plot structure than when examining the unconventional life of Japan's "gay boy" culture.
The term "bara/rose'' in Japanese culture has essentially the same connotation as "pansy'' in colloquial English, and is often used as a derogatory term for perceived males who exhibit feminine attributes. As elsewhere in the world in the 1960s, gay and transgender identities were often conflated, with cross-dressing and transgenderism uniformly thrown into the Japanese subculture known as "gayboys." Funeral Parade of Roses focuses on drug bar hostess Eddie (played by transgender actress Peter) starting an affair with the club owner Gonda (Yoshio Tsuchiya). However, the drag bar madam Leda (Osamu Ogasawara) is also sleeping with Gonda, and sees Eddie's assault on her lover as a threat to his power, increasing tension between the two.
But Matsumoto was a notoriously experimental filmmaker, so much as we are meant to question our understanding of Eddie’s gender and sexuality which the film comes very close to uncoupling as synonymous, we are also made to question our basic understanding of cinematic narrative construction.
The chronological order of events is played with, long diversions from the central love triangle plot take up the majority of the second act, and we are often introduced to characters that have little bearing on Eddie’s conflicts. Matsumoto doesn’t stop there, though, as he gets a lot more metafictional with his experimentation. Actresses are pulled aside for interviews about their real lives as “gay boys;” we see footage of the film crew during filming and cuts still include the presence of a clapperboard; segments of avant garde short films weave their way into the fabric, and persistent title cards reinforce the artificiality of cinematic presentation.
Each of these techniques are designed to make us question what makes a film, just as Eddie (and to some extent the actress portraying her) is a direct challenge to classical definitions of male and female.
Here's a clip of one of the funniest scenes of this movie, according to me.
Now some pics !（￣︶￣）
