Funeral Parade of Roses

Not RatedDrama

Synopsis

While dealing drugs on the side, Gonda operates the Genet, a gay bar in Tokyo where he has hired a stable of transvestites to service the customers. The madame or lead "girl" of the bar is Leda, an older, old fashioned geisha-styled transvestite with who Gonda lives and is in a relationship. Arguably, the most popular of the girls working at the bar now is Eddie, a younger, modern transvestite. Like Leda, Eddie lives openly as a woman. Eddie's troubled life includes her father having deserted the family when she was a child, and having had a difficult relationship with her mother following, she who mocked Eddie's ability to be the man the of the family. Gonda enters into a sexual relationship with Eddie, who he promises to make madame of the bar, replacing Leda in both facets of his life, with Eddie having threatened to quit otherwise. While Leda suspects what Gonda and Eddie are up to, Gonda tells Leda what she wants to hear, much as he tells Eddie what she wants to hear. As this triangle plays itself out, what actually happens is affected by a joint history between Gonda and Eddie of which they are unaware. This film teeters between fiction and non-fiction as a secondary story is Eddie's friendship with a group of counter-culturalists, including filmmaker Guevara, whose making of a movie mirrors the making of this film. That balance tips into non-fiction as the actual actors in this and Guevara's movie talk about issues covered in this film, such as drug use, and sexuality, especially transvestism as the transvestite characters are played by real life transvestites.

Production Budget Analysis

The production budget for Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) has not been publicly disclosed.

CAST: Shinnosuke Ikehata, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Emiko Azuma, Toshiya Fujita, Kiyoshi Awazu, Osamu Ogasawara DIRECTOR: Toshio Matsumoto CINEMATOGRAPHY: Tatsuo Suzuki MUSIC: Joji Yuasa PRODUCTION: Art Theatre Guild, Matsumoto Production

Box Office Performance

Theatrical box office data is not publicly available for Funeral Parade of Roses (1969). This may indicate a limited release, direct-to-streaming, or a release predating modern box office tracking.

Profitability Assessment

Insufficient publicly available data to assess profitability.

INDUSTRY IMPACT

Funeral Parade of Roses is considered a landmark of queer cinema and of the Japanese New Wave film movement in the English-speaking world. According to film critic Jasper Sharp, Funeral Parade of Roses was the first film to acknowledge Japan's gay subculture. The Japanese queer magazine Barazoku was named after the film.

PRODUCTION NOTES

▸ Casting

Matsumoto hired non-professional actors to play roles in the film, often from the gay community of Tokyo. The avant-garde performance group '' and various media personalities were also hired to play themselves, including the film critic Nagaharu Yodogawa, who ends the film by imitating his own television programme. On one occasion, Matsumoto thought of the idea of using naked men with their backs to the camera. He spontaneously asked a production assistant to go to Shinjuku Station on the same day to ask people if they wanted to be in the film. Peter, who was sixteen years old at the time, was scouted to play the role of Eddie at a gay bar where he worked part-time. Prior to working on Funeral Parade'', he had never cross-dressed. Matsumoto had already seen over 100 candidates (via photos or auditions) for the role of Eddie, but considered Peter to be a perfect fit for the role after he went to the bar with the film's art director and cinematographer, Tatsuo Suzuki. Peter reflected on his performance in 2017 as being precisely acted according to Matsumoto's direction.

▸ Post-Production

The film was set and shot in Tokyo, particularly in the Shinjuku area. Although a script was used, much of the film was improvised in order to heighten the sense of realism and dramatic interest. Given the film's low budget, there was a rush to shoot as much film as possible. The opening of Funeral Parade was shot at a location behind the Shinjuku Koma Theater. The crew shot some footage using guerilla-style filmmaking as they could not receive permission to film in Shinjuku. This entailed creating an escape plan in case police were present by deciding which staff members would allow police to catch them to ensure the others could get away.

The film's cinematography makes use of extreme close-ups to create a dynamic affect, and mirrors that establish a bilateral symmetrical image to blur the line between reality and reflection. Matsumoto incorporated his first video artwork Magnetic Scramble into Funeral Parade, which showed television images of student protesters distorted with a magnetic coil. During filming on set, the photographer Daidō Moriyama took a series of photographs on 5 January 1969; later in the year he used the filmmakers' technique of scrambling the television set for his photo series Accident published in Asahi Camera.

When asked in a 2014 interview about the construction and editing processes of Funeral Parade of Roses, Matsumoto responded:

Funeral Parade of Roses is a film about boundaries. Boundaries are relative to the spectator’s perspective, [...] The obvious example of this is that of the “gay boys” themselves.