Funeral Parade of Roses 1969 DVDRip x264 AC3-KARiNA

Funeral Parade of Roses (1969)
Directed by Toshio Matsumoto
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064068]

[ Synopsis ]
A feverish collision of avant-garde aesthetics and grind-house shocks (not to mention a direct influence on Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange), Funeral Parade of Roses takes us on an electrifying journey into the nether-regions of the late-’60s Tokyo underworld. In Toshio Matsumoto’s controversial debut feature, seemingly nothing is taboo: neither the incorporation of visual flourishes straight from the worlds of contemporary graphic-design, painting, comic-books, and animation; nor the unflinching depiction of nudity, sex, drug-use, and public-toilets. But of all the “transgressions” here on display, perhaps one in particular stands out the most: the film’s groundbreaking and unapologetic portrayal of Japanese gay subculture.

Cross-dressing club-kid Eddie (played by real-life transvestite entertainer extraordinaire Peter, famed for his role as Kyoami the Fool in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran) vies with a rival drag-queen (Osamu Ogasawara) for the favours of drug-dealing cabaret-manager Gonda (Yoshio Tsuchiya, himself a Kurosawa player who appeared in such films as Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, and High and Low). Passions escalate and blood begins to flow — before all tensions are released in a jolting climax that prefigures by nearly thirty years Tsai Ming-liang’s similarly scandalous The River.

With its mixture of purely narrative sequences and documentary footage, Funeral Parade of Roses comes to us from a moment when cinema set itself to test, and even eradicate, the boundaries between fiction and reality, desire and experience; consequently, the film shares a kinship with such other 1969 works as Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide and Ingmar Bergman’s A Passion [The Passion of Anna]. Yet Matsumoto achieves a zig-zag modulation between pathos and hilarity that makes his picture utterly unique: a filmic howl in the face of social, moral, and artistic convention.

[ Video ]
x264
Duration 1h 44mn
Bit rate 1 950 Kbps
Nominal bit rate 2 000 Kbps
Width 720 pixels
Height 480 pixels
Display aspect ratio 4/3
Frame rate 23.976 fps

[ Audio - Track 1 ]
Format AC-3
Bit rate 384 Kbps
Channel(s) 2 channels
Language Japanese
Subtitles English

[ Audio - Track 2 (Director's Commentary) ]
Format AC-3
Bit rate 192 Kbps
Channel(s) 2 channels
Language Japanese
Subtitles English

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