In 1955, Silver Wheels, Toshio Matsumoto's now lost collaboration with avant-garde composer Toru Takemitsu, helped inaugurate postwar Japanese experimental film. Since then, Matsumoto has embodied the mobility of Japanese experimental video and film with a career that spans work in criticism, theater, documentary, and independent filmmaking. In this program, we pay special homage to Matsumoto's oeuvre with a screening of his drag-queen melodrama Funeral Parade of Roses, a unique film that borrows the not-yet-politicized phenomenon of male homosexuality in 1969 Japan to launch a potent critique of Japanese society at the apex of high-growth economics. A classic in Japan's New Wave tradition, Funeral Parade dazzles in its humorous amalgamation of documentary, narrative, and visual experimentation. ? Jonathan M. Hall and Michelle Puetz

Scandalous when it first appeared, Funeral Parade of Roses is still a sensational depiction of the gay demimonde as it existed in the Tokyo of the late '60s. Eddie, the wiggy protagonist, is a young roustabout who works at the Genet, a gay bar managed by the much desired Gonda. Dressed in miniskirts and false eyelashes, Eddie is rivaled for the affections of Gonda only by Leda, his ferocious transvestite mistress. It's cross-dressers in a cold war gone hot. The first Japanese film to deal unabashedly with gay culture (the original press materials say "seven gay boys appear on stage, all performed by real gay boys") Funeral Parade of Roses is also a modern parody of the Oedipus legend. But here the Oedipal story is totally inverted--Eddie must eliminate his obstructive mother for the wild embrace of his father. The fatalism of the story doesn't deter our amazement at the performance director Toshio Matsumoto has elicited from his flamboyant but nonprofessional cast, particularly the two leads. Peter, who plays Eddie, is a famous female impersonator known for his emancipated woman, while Osamu Ogasawara, enlisted to play Leda, does a virulent portrayal of the kimonoed siren. By enacting its love triangle in drag, Funeral Parade of Roses redresses the Oedipal myth--an essential bit of anarchy.