Funeral Parade of Roses (1969)

Thursday, December 12, 2019 @ 7:00 PM
Globe Cinema - 617 8 Avenue SW, Calgary, AB
$12 General | $10 Members/Seniors/Students | $40 5-Pack Punch Pass | $99 Season Pass

Funeral Parade of Roses follows the underground travails of Tokyo transsexual coquette Eddie her band of non-conforming friends.

Acknowledged as a primary influence on Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), this psychedelic, fourth wall-breaking drama has to be seen to be believed. Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) follows the underground travails of Tokyo transsexual coquette Eddie (played by renowned androgynous Japanese performer Peter) and her band of non-conforming friends, including Guevera (Toyosaburo Uchiyama), a filmmaking hipster poseur, and Leda (Osamu Ogasawara), Eddie’s long-suffering pal with whom she shares a lover. The film is a berserk combo of Jean-Luc Godard, Ancient Greek myth, and Three Stooges-esque comedy. Presented in a newly restored print, this aggressively meta dissection of the nature of transgression, cinema, and the erotic, is a near hysterical yet unforgettable pageant of decadent, wild, and still-prescient ideas regarding the nature of sexual and cultural identity.

-Written by Scott Lang

FOCUS: SEXUALITY

Jean-Luc Godard famously once said “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.” Film critic Pauline Kael seemingly echoed this statement when she titled one of her books Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Both filmmaker and critic observed the obvious relationship of sexuality and violence to cinema itself, and in both cases the amorous element comes first. Our Focus: Sexuality series explores how sexuality over the course of the last century has paralleled the development of cinematic language. Featuring films from the 1920s up to the 1990s, this globe-spanning series presents key films that consider subjects such as female sexual autonomy, gender fluidity and performativity, amorous power dynamics, and toxic predation. These are firebrand movies, emphasizing how the presentation of sexuality and human relationships on-screen is limited by the specific sociocultural framework of their era. In their emotional and cinematic power, these films are still strongly resonant and provocative today.

About Calgary Cinematheque

We are a non-profit film society dedicated to presenting significant, challenging, and essential works of cinema art in Calgary. During our season, which runs from October to April, we screen films weekly, in curated programs which situate each film in a thematic and historical context. We do this because we believe cinema is an essential form of artistic, social, and political expression. Audiences should be able to engage with a wide range of cinematic expression, not only with what is commercially viable. We believe in the power of sharing these experiences with other people in a theatrical setting and we strive to cultivate a community around that experience.  

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