In 1955, Silver Wheels, Toshio Matsumoto's now lost collaboration with avant-garde composer Toru Takemitsu, helped inaugurate postwar Japanese experimental film. Since then, Matsumoto has embodied the mobility of Japanese experimental video and film with a career that spans work in criticism, theater, documentary, and independent filmmaking. In this program, we pay special homage to Matsumoto's oeuvre with a screening of his drag-queen melodrama Funeral Parade of Roses, a unique film that borrows the not-yet-politicized phenomenon of male homosexuality in 1969 Japan to launch a potent critique of Japanese society at the apex of high-growth economics. A classic in Japan's New Wave tradition, Funeral Parade dazzles in its humorous amalgamation of documentary, narrative, and visual experimentation.