"I am
the wound, the knives that strike, The blows that crush, the head that reels, I
am wrenched limbs and grinding wheels, Victim and hangman, as you
like!...", quote from the poem Héautontimorouménos by Charles Baudelaire
(Greek title meaning "The Self Tormenter") opens funeral parade of
roses and carries in her, already, the seeds of the artwork. The opening after
World War II of Tokyo's first gay bar in the Shinjuku district soon made it the
meeting place for LGBTQ + populations of that time. Less repressed than in
other territories (even if not completely accepted either), the gay place of
Tokyo is one of the most lively of the time in the 60s. Quickly called the
"Gay Boys", the drag- queen or transvestite (although a certain
distinction between the two may exist since) are an integral part of it and
enjoy a certain visibility within Japanese society. They are present in the
media, in culture, and are sometimes even hired to replace hostesses. Maruyama
aka Akihiro Micua, cited as an example in the feature film, is a transgender
star and will notably star in an adaptation of Mishima's play, The Black
Lizard. Matsumoto will choose to tell the story of the Shinjuku district and
these people.
Born in 1932,
he was quickly drawn to experimental cinema and forms. Artist-filmmaker, he
will make more than 40 experimental short films but also documentary films that
will highlight various Japanese professions. Seeking a real transvestite for
the leading role, he wanders through over 200 bars in Shinjuku before meeting
17-year-old Peter. It's love at first sight, Peter will be Eddie and Eddie will
be Peter. Already, reality and fiction are intertwined. Matsumoto obviously
wants it and he will also be happy to play constantly between the lines.
Several times in the feature film, the film's own actors are questioned. These
short sequences counterbalance the fiction since they paint a different
portrait of the actors / characters. If Peter validates the resemblance to
Eddie, the landlady who plays the role of the antagonist is much more
sympathetic in her "real" role. A flash of Godard's cinema-vérite,
the director also questions anonymous people about their sexuality. They
express themselves in front of the camera and tell their stories. Some have
always been gay, others became gay two months ago because they "like
it".
These
sequences tell above all a liberation. Liberation of morals and speech. The
liberation of people, too, was at the center of the concerns of the 1960s in
many countries around the world. Matsumoto, him, had already shown images of
revolts and police repressions in his short film of 1969, For My Crushed Right
Eye (kind of long trailer of the aforementioned film) and will do the same in
funeral parade of roses, registering his film in a political and protest
dimension. It is then the prerogative of the filmmakers of the new Japanese
wave. Ôshima with Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (also released in 1969 and sharing
the Shinjuku district as a backdrop and highlighting sexuality) or The Empire
of the Senses will seek to shock Japanese society and raise awareness.
Matsumoto also shares anarchist and revolutionary ideas with Terayama and his
essential Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets, in 1971. One of the
characters in the feature film is also called Guevara, makes films, organizes
screenings, tampering with television images by distorting them. At the same
time, Matsumoto shows the birth of experimental cinema (“Menas Jokas” is
ironically mentioned), of a new cinematography which will soon be diffused
everywhere.
Shinjuku, at
that time, was not only the gay district, it was also the district of artists
and prostitution. It is the equivalent of a Greenwich Village in London or the
Latin Quarter in Paris, spaces of exceptional creative freedom. Roland Barthes,
in his seminal work Empire of Signs (1970), where he recounts his various trips
to Japan, will also describe this effervescence. Eminently regarded in Japan,
Barthes is part of the same generation of authors as Genet or Bataille, authors
themselves affiliated to a culture of transgression (to which we must of course
add Sade) who will intensely inspire Matsumoto. The bar where part of the plot
takes place is also called the Genet. Leda (Osamu Ogasawara) is the boss. She
too is a transvestite and she is jealous of young Peter. Peter is young,
handsome, desired, while Leda is no more than the owner of the bar and in fact
does not make many people dream anymore. Matsumoto highlights a real
face-to-face between the two generations, which at the same time takes place in
reality since Peter also steals the limelight on the queer scene of the time.
When Leda
looks at herself in the mirror, wondering about her beauty as the witch queen
in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Eddie's face appears superimposed. Later,
the face-to-face will take shape in a parody of Western duels ... with dummy
pistols! The parody, notably through the use of the slapstick, is one of the
many other aspects of the film. Matsumoto uses it on various occasions, as if
to counterbalance certain sequences which, in any other fiction, would have
accentuated the drama. When Eddie and Leda fight, or when young women curse the
transvestites, it is exaggeration, like the films of Chaplin or Keaton, rather
than pure violence that is chosen by Matsumoto. Is he trying to avoid drama
with social value, documentary “serious” when he wants above all to highlight a
population formerly invisible in Japanese cinema? This ambition seems to be
part of a desire for global distancing. Like a Godard in the early 1960s,
Matsumoto wanted to break the illusion.
Theorized by
Brecht, essence of Japanese theater, it is a question of interrupting the natural
process of identification of the spectator or the reader with the characters
with whom he is confronted. Brecht mentions that this principle is placed at
the “frontier of aesthetics and politics”, in order to “make an object, a
character, a process perceive, and at the same time make it unusual, strange”,
and “take its distances from reality. »¹ When Matsumoto decides to mock
his characters via the slapstick, it is to accentuate their depth and give them
another dimension, a political and societal dimension. They are like the
others, they are different, they exist. Matsumoto also ironically uses cards
like "What a subtle and mysterious plot!" "Or" Censorship
"when the female transvestites make their need in the urinals of the men
under the astonished gaze of the latter. Eddie, Leda and the others are thus,
first of all, men who disguise themselves as women to play a role ... and who
play the role of transvestites who play a role in the film. This quadruple
layer tells the story of a transformation, of an evolution, of multiple facets.
Scenes of awakenings, naked (physically and as "men", without
costume), during the preparation of the cross-dressing (of the actors who are
about to enter the scene), to the sequences of cinema-vérite (dialogues in front
of the camera) then of the evenings where they are transvestite, Matsumoto
tells about all the psychological complexity of the transvestite.
Cross-dressing is a transgression, a transgression of dominant codes, of
established rules.
Also one of
the main subjects of the Oedipus myth. Oedipus, who became a complex under the
writings of Freud and one of the greatest psychoanalytic concepts in our modern
history, is first and foremost a hero of Greek mythology. Son of Jocasta and
Laïos (who gave his name to the expression laïus), he was abandoned by them
following the words of the Oracle of Delphi, who announced to them a little
earlier that they would have a son. and that he would kill his father and marry
his mother. Some variations of the myth explain the fierce statement of the
Oracle as a response to a malicious act committed by the father, the kidnapping
of another's son as a first and foundational transgression. The second will be
the abandonment of a child and its mutilation. When Oedipus kills his father,
without knowing it, while they are both on the same road, he does to his father
what the latter wanted to do to him: kill him. The father's hidden
transgressions unwittingly infiltrate the son's actions. When Eddie's mother
sleeps with a man who is not Peter's father, Peter is humiliated and decides to
kill his mother and the stranger. He avenges himself, he avenges his father
whom he does not know and of whom he knows nothing.
Oedipus,
arriving then in Thebes, frees the city by answering the enigmas of the Sphinx
and is thanked by the regent who offers him Jocasta in marriage. After new
developments, everything becomes clearer and the drama breaks out. Oedipus is
the son of Jocasta. Jocasta is the mother of Oedipus. The prophecy is
fulfilled. The latter commits suicide while he himself mutilates ... as he was
by his parents. Matsumoto having reversed the myth (like the transvestite
reverses his appearance, becoming male or female), Eddie (pun with Oedipus) is
not going to marry his mother but to sleep with his unknown father. Father who
is also Eda's lover, key to the rivalry between the two women. It is also
astonishing to see Yoshio Tsuchiya in this role, him a regular of Kurosawa (The
Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Sanjuro, The Hidden Fortress) or of the kaijū eiga, the
Japanese monster film. It was young Peter and his friends (everyday and in
fiction) who, having seen him play in films on television, would have chosen
him following a panel proposed by Matsumoto. Again, therefore, the father's
hidden transgressions (abandoning his family, being sexually attracted to
transvestites) impact the son's life. When the truth emerges, when it is
visible to the eyes of the two protagonists, they cannot stand it and grant
themselves the same punishment as Oedipus: they burst their eyes so they never
see themselves again, never again to see the ultimate transgression committed,
transgression become crime.
Funeral
parade of roses is a meteorite. An unidentified, unidentifiable object. It is a
cinematographic transgression because it upsets the codes and the rules. It is
a multiple work, both fictional and documentary, comedy and drama, protean and
one-sided, mystical and realistic. Matsumoto paints the portrait of an era and
its changes, of a generation and its evolutions, men and women or men-women in
an experimental maelstrom. Greatly influenced by the French New Wave (Godard,
therefore, but also Resnais who is present with the same effects of
overexposure of images, of extreme solarization - Sabatier effect - during the
sex scenes as in Hiroshima, mon amour. light is also transgender!), paying
homage to Pasolini's Oedipus-King filmed two years earlier (could it really be
otherwise?), disguising a century-old myth (which Kurosawa, accustomed to
Shakespearean adaptations, will also do in Ran. .. with Peter as the actor,
where the daughters of King Lear will have become sons) to ultimately assert
that there is no morality or certainties except that, quoting Hegel, "the
man's mind reaches the absolute through a ceaseless negation "... and that
of a woman?
(1) Petit Organon pour le
théâtre, Éd. De L’Arche, Paris, 1948 (Fragments 47 à 49)
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