Doors: 19:30 / Start time: 20:00
Location: Spektrum Berlin
01 June, 2017

The XenoEntities Network would like to gather friend to watch the screening of film Funeral Parade of Roses and to pay homage to the Japanese director Toshio Matsumoto, one of the pioneers of sixties counter-cinema, video artist and critic, who just died the past month, April 12, 2017.

In the 1960s he started making experimental films and video art, influencing many other artists. His most acclaimed film is Funeral Parade of Roses (Bara no soretsu), a loose adaptation of Oedipus Rex set in the underground gay counterculture of 1960s Tokyo. The film will be preceded by the screening of White Hole, a hypnotic short Matsumoto directed ten years after. This short will send the spectator to Matsumoto's experimental cosmologies, carefully soothing our eyes before the bewildering and frantic images of Funeral Parade of Roses.

PROGRAM
Toshio Matsumoto, White Hole (1979, 6′)
Toshio Matsumoto, Funeral Parade of Roses (1969, 107′)

Director Toshio Matsumoto’s shattering, kaleidoscopic masterpiece is one of the most subversive and intoxicating films of the late 1960s: 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. Featuring breathtaking black-and-white cinematography by Tatsuo Suzuki, Funeral Parade of Roses offers a frank, openly erotic and unapologetic portrait of an underground community of drag queens. Whether laughing with drunken businessmen, eating ice cream with her girlfriends, or fighting in the streets with a local girl gang, Peter’s ravishing 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. Her stunning presence, in bell-bottom pants, black leather jacket and Brian Jones hair-do, is a direct threat to the social order, both in the Bar Genet and in the streets of Tokyo.

Program curated by Lou Drago, Pedro Marum, and Rita Macedo.