Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/18/18

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, September 18, 2018

Funeral Parade of Roses (1969, Toshio Matsumoto)

Pîtâ in Funeral Parade of Roses

Eddie: Pîtâ
Leda: Osamu Ogasawara
Gonda: Yoshio Tsuchiya
Guevara: Toyosaburo Uchiyama
Tony: Don Madrid
Eddie's Mother: Emiko Azuma
Jimi: Yoshimi Jo
Juju: Koichi Nakamura
Greco: Flamenco Umeji
Mari: Saako Oota
Nora: Taro Manji
Philosopher: Mikio Shibayama
Sabu: Wataru Hikonagi
Piro: Fuchisumi Gomi
Okei: Chieko Kobayashi
Radon: Yo Sato
Humpback: Keiichi Takanaga

Director: Toshio Matsumoto
Screenplay: Toshio Matsumoto
Cinematography: Tatsuo Suzuki
Art direction: Setsu Asakura
Film editing: Toshie Iwasa
Music: Joji Yuasa

Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses both participates in and parodies the late-1960s avant-garde "underground" film movement, with its reliance on eccentric cuts and random inserts. There's a scene in which the filmmakers are shooting a badly tuned television set, and keep fiddling with the set to get the kind of distorted image they want. And at one point someone quotes the avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas -- and then gets his name wrong, calling him "Menas Jokas." Matsumoto's film keeps the viewer off-balance at all times, moving in and out of what we take to be "reality" to expose that it's all moviemaking. There is, for example, a scene in which the cross-dressing protagonist, Eddie, and a black man, Tony, seem to be having sex, with lots of pornographic gasping and facial contortions. But then the camera angle shifts and we see that there's a camera crew surrounding the bed where Tony is propped up by himself on the headboard while the camera is focused on the face of Eddie, simulating ecstasy. Even the main story of the film gets its distancing when we cut to the actor who plays Eddie, Pîtâ (or Peter, as the English language screen credits have it), being interviewed about the role he's playing. It's much like his own life, he says, except for the incest part. At this point in the film, we don't know about the incest part, which precipitates the crisis in Eddie's life. Suffice it to say that Matsumoto based a large part of the film on Oedipus Rex. The central story deals with the rivalry between Eddie and Leda, the "Madame" of a club that caters to salarymen who want to sleep with gei boi, for the affections of Gonda, a man who turns out to have more significance in Eddie's life than is at first apparent. There are some longueurs in Matsumoto's film, mostly having to do with the avant-garde sequences but also with a too-long drugged-out orgy scene. (Other people's orgies are invariably boring.) But there are some genuine shocks and some real emotion in the film, and the performance by Pîtâ -- best known as the androgynous Kyoami, the analogue to the Fool in Ran (1985), Akira Kurosawa's reworking of King Lear -- is outstanding.