The radical cinema of Toshio Matsumoto

by Chris MaGee

Some of you may have already heard of filmmaker Toshio Matsumoto whose "Funeral Parade of Roses" has been available on a British region 2 DVD from Masters of Cinema, but he's such an interesting filmmaker that I'd wanted to feature him on the blog for awhile now, so here's my best effort.

Matsumoto started out like many filmmakers as a child crazy for the movies. When he was a teenager he would do the rounds of the movie theatres in Shinjuku, catching almost every film that was released. The young Matsumoto was so obsessed by the movies that he was arrested by police twice for truancy.

The only other thing that occupied Matsumoto's mind besides movies was painting, and he initially wanted to pursue it as a career, but through parental disapproval and financial necessity he chose to study the more lucrative field of medicine, or at least that's what he told his family. After his first year of University he switched his major to art history and it was through one of his courses that he was introduced to avant-garde European cinema of the 1920's. It was these confounding and fearless films that changed the course of Matsumoto's life.

After university Matsumoto took a job at a mid-sized production company, Shin Riken Cinema, in order to have access to every aspect of film production. While he never formally attended film school it was his job at Shin Riken that doubled for an education in filmmaking.

As mentioned above Matsumoto, who now holds the position of professor and dean of the Kyoto University of Art and Design, is best known for 1969's "Funeral Parade of Roses", a radical film about the rise of a transvestite through the 60s subculture of Tokyo, it was in his experimanetal short films that his love for avant-garde films of the 1920's fused with his 1960's revolutionary goals to "de-automatize" and "de-systematize" the way audiences view film. One of the best examples of this is his 1968 film "For the Damaged Right Eye" (presented in two parts below care of YouTube), a kaleidoscopic split-screen journey through the sexual and political mind of the then counterculture generation.

For those interested in exploring Matsumoto's films more there's no better place online than UbuWeb which features the full selection of Matsumoto's short films. Thanks goes to Grey Lodge for much of the info for this profile.


For the Damaged Right Eye - Toshio Matsumoto (1968) Part 1




For the Damaged Right Eye - Toshio Matsumoto (1968) Part 2