Funeral Parade of Roses (薔薇の葬列, Bara no Sōretsu) is a 1969 Japanese experimental film written and directed by Toshio Matsumoto. It is a loose adaptation of the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, set in the underground gay culture of 1960s Tokyo. Considered part of the Angura film movement, it combines elements of arthouse, documentary, and experimental filmmaking. The film centers 'gay-boy' Eddie, a young transgender woman working at a gay bar in Tokyo played by well-known Japanese gay entertainer Peter. The plot follows Eddie as she engages in a sexual relationship with the bar's owner, who promotes her as the lead girl of the establishment. According to Matsumoto, Funeral Parade of Roses is "in a way a film about filmmaking" and "a film about boundaries".
Funeral Parade of Roses originates from the Japanese New Wave film movement, and is considered a monumental work of queer cinema. The film was released by ATG (Art Theatre Guild) on 13 September 1969 in Japan, but it did not receive a United States release until 29 October 1970. In June 2017, it received a 4K restoration and a limited theatrical re-release.Murthi Vikram, Vikram (2016-07-13). "Exclusive: Cinelicious Restoring Japanese Queer Classic 'Funeral Parade of Roses'". Cinelicious Pics. Retrieved 2025-11-09.
Plot Funeral Parade of Roses revolves around the underground culture and queer community in Tokyo. The main narrative follows Eddie and other performers at the host club bar Genet. Interspersed throughout the narrative are flashbacks, intertitles, and interviews. Funeral Parade is presented as a nonlinear narrative. The following plot summary gives an account of the film broadly according to the events shown on screen.
Eddie and Gonda have sex in Gonda's apartment. Eddie works as a transgender bar hostess at the Genet, a gay bar in Tokyo that employs several to host customers. The Genet is managed by the drug dealer Gonda, who lives together with Leda, the current madame or "lead girl" of the bar. Eddie and Gonda leave the apartment together, Leda spies them from a street corner. Eddie sees Leda when Gonda drives past the street corner; Gonda promises to make Eddie the new madame of the bar.
A group of and underground filmmakers are seen kicking an inflatable seat on a street in Tokyo, while Guevara, a member of the collective, watches them. Eddie takes a shower but arrives late to work. She gets drunk and dances with Tony, an American soldier. As they walk through the streets they are passed by student protesters; the two take a taxi together and have sex. The underground filmmaking collective films the news footage shown on the television while using a magnetic coil to distort the image. The group finish filming and abuse eye drops for a hallucinogenic high.
Eddie watches a performing arts group enact a funeral procession. Wandering the streets of Tokyo, she enters an art exhibit to avoid men trying to pick her up. In the exhibit a voice on a tape recorder speaks about individuals masking their personalities, Eddie passes out in the art museum. While at work on a different night, the police arrive, Eddie warns Gonda and he hides his drug dealing operation. Eddie goes shopping with friends, visiting clothing stores and a hair salon, eating ice cream and entering a men's bathroom. Leda and Gonda fight about Eddie, with Gonda saying that he would rather fire Leda than Eddie. After viewing one of Guevara's films, Eddie and the other members of the collective smoke marijuana and dance. For her evening debut as the bar's madame, Eddie grooms herself. Leda confronts Eddie in the bar about her relationship with Gonda and the two of them fight.
In a series of flashbacks we see Eddie's relationship with her mother. Some time before she became a hostess Eddie's mother reminisces about Eddie's absent father. Eddie tells her that she will always be there, to which her mother laughs. At another point, Eddie tries on her mother's makeup; when her mother discovers Eddie kissing her reflection in the mirror, she beats Eddie. Later, Eddie's mother brings another man home. Eddie follows them upstairs and stabs them both with a knife. Guevara and Eddie grow closer to each other and, after a while, have sex.
Eddie prepares for work but encounters an injured student protestor as she leaves, she spends time healing him, causing her to be late. While out with two friends, Eddie and her friends are confronted by a trio of women, and a fight ensues. Gonda visits Leda and is angered when she feigns concern for Eddie's well-being, he fires and breaks up with her. Leda is later found lying in her bed, having died by suicide, wearing a veil and surrounded by roses. After Leda's funeral, Eddie is promoted to madame of the Genet. That night she and Gonda have sex while elsewhere Guevara dances. Eddie takes a shower, during which Gonda finds a photograph of Eddie as a child with her parents. Gonda recognises Eddie's mother as his former lover. Realising that Eddie is his child, Gonda kills himself with a knife. Upon seeing this, Eddie takes the knife and stabs herself in each eye, before stumbling outside in front of a crowd of people.
Cast Peter as Eddie Osamu Ogasawara as Leda Yoshio Tsuchiya as Gonda Emiko Azuma as Eddie's mother Toyosaburo Uchiyama as Guevara Don Madrid as Tony Koichi Nakamura as Juju Chieko Kobayashi as Okei Shōtarō Akiyama as himself Kiyoshi Awazu as himself
Production Development
Toshio Matsumoto worked as a director and film theorist through the 1950s. In 1958, he published a manifesto calling for a new method of filmmaking that he termed 'neo-documentarism'. The method merged the styles of documentary film and the avant-garde to portray both an external and psychic realism that emphasised the cinematic form as well as the political realities that were depicted. This form of realism was theorised by Matsumoto as a reaction against films that subordinated the artist's subjectivity to a hidden ideology. The documentary approach to reality and the avant-garde emphasis on subjectivity would provide a dialectical synthesis that could see each method draw out the strengths of the other in creating a 'new realism'. Matsumoto made short films in this style before making Funeral Parade of Roses, his first feature film, as a practice of his theory.
At the time Matsumoto was developing Funeral Parade, —or, underground—culture, the films of the Japanese New Wave, and the radical student movement were informing contemporary changes in aesthetic and political realities. Matsumoto himself was inspired by the French New Wave and American underground cinema, including the films of Luis Buñuel, Jack Smiths Flaming Creatures (1963) and Kenneth Angers Scorpio Rising (1963). Funeral Parade of Roses is loosely based on the myth of Oedipus and takes visual elements from Alain Resnaiss film Hiroshima mon amour (1959). The literary critic and scholar Kitamura Sae also indicates that Matsumoto was inspired by the story of "Snow White" and Shūji Terayamas play "Marie in Furs". Funeral Parades script was written prior to the creation of Matsumoto's film For the Damaged Right Eye (1968), which was made just before the events of May 68.
In order to secure funds to make the film, Matsumoto took out a loan to finance the production of Funeral Parade. As part of his efforts to raise money, he participated in the 1970 Osaka World Exposition, which was boycotted by many radical artists as they saw it as a distraction from the 1970 Anpo protests and as a representation of the excesses of consumer culture. Matsumoto chose to work outside film production companies so that he could more accurately execute on his original ideas and intentions for the film. He partnered with the Art Theatre Guild (ATG), which not only co-financed independent features, but also acted as distributor. The ATG produced one film at a time and gave production budgets of (about one fifth of the average studio production budget).
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.
Production and 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 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. [...] But in Funeral Parade of Roses I dealt with the additional issue of the deconstruction, and reconstruction of the order of time, [...] time in Funeral Parade of Roses is suddenly, and objectively deconstructed, reconstructed, and connected even without a motivating character; in other words, the time objectively distorts itself, instead of relating back to the past through someone’s subjective point of view.
The film is edited together using rapid intercutting between its narrative, abstract images, and non-fictional content. The film makes heavy use of references and intertextuality, including a segment taken from Matsumoto's short film Extasis (1969). Graphic designs referencing comics, as well as direct quotations from Charles Baudelaires poem collection, the Les Fleurs du mal, and the films of Alain Renais and Charlie Chaplin. During a scene where Eddie faints in an art museum, the drawings on the wall are taken from an unrealised art project by Tatsuo Ikeda. The film's composer was Joji Yuasa, and Sadao Miyazaki was its hairstylist.
Themes Queerness and politics