…good starting point for this (re)discovery could be the recent release (by Cinelicious Pics) of Funeral Parade of Roses on Blu-ray and DVD, Matsumoto Toshio’s masterpiece newly restored in 4K, released in Japan in 1969 and recently screened in selected theaters around the U.S.A. The release is significant not only for the film itself, a unique movie experience indeed, but also because included in the package are eight extra works that Matsumoto made between 1961 and 1975: Nishijin, The Song of Stones, Ecstasis, Metastasis, Expansion, Mona Lisa, Siki Soku Ze Ku and Atman.
More than ten months have passed since the death of Matsumoto, and this release is a good and timely opportunity for me to collect my thoughts, trying to position his oeuvre in the context of post-war Japanese cinema, and to draw connections between Matsumoto and others filmmakers and the cultural milieu he grew up in as a filmmaker and artist.
In a career spanning more than fifty years Matsumoto made short and feature movies and moved freely from documentary to art-house films, and from pure experimental cinema to expanded cinema and video installations, in a very unique process of hybridization and genre overlapping that has few parallels in the world of cinema and image making.
In the seven months since his passing, prompted by the tragic event, I decided to
In a career spanning more than fifty years Matsumoto made short and feature movies and moved freely from documentary to art-house films, and from pure experimental cinema to expanded cinema and video installations, in a very unique process of hybridization and genre overlapping that has few parallels in the world of cinema and image making.
In the seven months since his passing, prompted by the tragic event, I decided to
Asian Docs 