Funeral Parade of Roses

Funeral Parade of Roses (薔薇の葬列, 1969) is a Japanese avant-garde film by director Toshio Matsumoto that you can watch online on iFILM. Shot in Tokyo's Shinjuku district, it blends staged drama with street-level documentary footage to create something that sits uncomfortably between the two — by design.

Eddie is a young trans woman working the bars and back rooms of 1960s Tokyo's gay underground. Her affair with the bar's manager puts her on a collision course with Leda, the reigning queen of the establishment. Matsumoto cuts between their story and real interviews with the actual Shinjuku LGBTQ scene, so the line between performer and subject keeps dissolving. The black-and-white photography lurches and jumps in ways that feel less like technical roughness and more like a controlled pulse.

Stanley Kubrick screened the film before making A Clockwork Orange and borrowed several of its editing techniques — a fact that gives Matsumoto's experiment a curious legacy well beyond the arthouse circuit. Stream Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) online on iFILM.