Most people associate Japanese films that are more than 50 years old with very formal and disciplined works by post-war humanists like Ozu or Kurosawa. But there is an important link to the sometimes exuberant extreme cinema of today’s greats like Sono and Miike, which represented perhaps the wildest time in Japanese film history: the Japanese New Wave.
At this time, from the late 1950s to the 70s, subversive auteur filmmakers such as Oshima and Yoshida emerged. They not only questioned the prevailing film form, but also had a bone to pick with Japanese society and took on previously unseen perspectives. This is also the case in one of my personal favorite films, Funeral Parade of Roses aka Stake in My Flesh, which is even said to have inspired Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
Funeral Parade of Roses: The Japanese masterpiece that Stanley Kubrick used
Toshio Matsumoto’s avant-garde film takes us into the Tokyo LGBTQ scene during the 1960s. Here, the modern Eddie (stunning: Shinnosuke ‘Peter’ Ikehata) and the old-fashioned Leda (Osamu Ogasawara) vie for the favor of the drug dealer Gonda (Yoshio Tsuchiya) and the position of the head Mama-san in his nightclub. The non-linear narrative is repeatedly interrupted by experimental sex scenes with lyre organ music and interviews with the actors. For many of the amateur stars it was the first and only film.
The terms of are defined very differently today Gay, drag queen/transvestite and transgender are discussed much more fluently here. Eddie is portrayed by the drag queen Peter, who is still famous in Japan today, but in the context of the film he is more what we would call a trans woman today, although that was the self-description at the time gay boy used. A term that seems to mean something slightly different to everyone interviewed.
Appropriately, masks and mirror images make up recurring motifs in the film, but it’s not just the gender expression of the rival nightclub ladies that is commented on. Parallel to their plot, the revolutionary director Guevara (Toyosaburo Uchiyama) is filming one with a glued-on beard (!) Film within a filmwhose filming overlaps with the real work on Funeral Parade of Roses. At the same time, filmmaker Matsumoto captures the left-wing activists of the Japanese student movement of the 1960s, which was closely linked to the film movement. Even those directors who were not de facto included at least dealt with it.
Where are the parallels to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange?
In addition to obvious parallels regarding drug use and violence, the suspected influences on the controversial literary adaptation A Clockwork Orange can be found primarily in time-lapse scenes and the music. So several fast-forwarded sex interludes from Stake in my flesh are reminiscent of the iconic Wilhelm Tell overture threesome by Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) and his fleeting acquaintances at Kubrick.
Both films also oscillate between experimental cinema, subversive slapstick and outright melodrama. In one scene, Eddie and Leda are wrestling in the bar with cowboy hats and manga speech bubbles over their heads, and a few minutes later the film becomes bloody Reenactment of Oedipus Rexincluding incest and gouged eyes.
This cinematic drug trip that doubles as semi-documentary time capsule into queer Japan of times gone by seems to have been well received not only by Kubrick. The film has an incredible Tomatometer score of 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and the popcorn meter is at 85 percent. And Moviepilot’s community rating of 7.5 is also impressive for such an eccentric black and white film.
For me personally, the film is a clear 10/10. His excess of creative color and dazzling identities is only surpassed by the beauty of the queer Shinjuku parallel world in black and white images. Peter in particular shines as an absolute scene superstar, with whom not only the camera falls in love from the first shot. But what’s even nicer is the certainty that even in conservative countries like Japan, rebellious art has always come from hidden corners.
Watch the trailer for Funeral Parade of Roses here:
Funeral Parade Of Roses 1969 – Trailer (English)
More queer Japan:
Can you stream Stake in My Flesh anywhere?
Yes! Now if you also want to celebrate the anniversary of this Japanese masterpiece, which is on September 13th this year 55 years old you can do this on Amazon and Apple TV. The film is available there in the original Japanese version with German subtitles as a rental and purchase title – under the international title Funeral Parade of Roses. The DVD here was released under the same name by Rapid Eye Movies.