EVENTS
“Funeral Parade of Roses” at Jacob Burns Film Center
Join us for a screening of director Toshio Matsumoto’s shattering, kaleidoscopic masterpiece Funeral Parade of Roses, followed by a Q&A with Kyle Turner, author of The Queer Film Guide: 100 Great Movies that Tell LGBTQIA+ Stories.
Long unavailable in the US, Funeral Parade of Roses is one of the most subversive and intoxicating films of the late 1960s: a headlong dive into a dazzling, unseen Tokyo night-world of drag queen bars and fabulous divas, fueled by booze, drugs, fuzz guitars, performance art, and black mascara. Stanley Kubrick cited the film as a direct influence on his own dystopian classic A Clockwork Orange.
The Wedding Banquet (on 35mm) at Nitehawk Prospect Park
Brokeback Mountain may have changed LGBTQIA+ cinema’s place in the mainstream in 2005, but Ang Lee has long been fascinated with the codes of masculinity, tradition, family, and queerness. For his 1993 romantic comedy The Wedding Banquet, part of his “Father Knows Best” Trilogy, Lee looked back to the ingredients of classic screwballs and farces for the modern New York tale of a gay interracial relationship that’s foisted back into the closet when the family of the Taiwanese half comes to visit. Co-written with longtime collaborator James Schamus and Neil Peng, and starring Winston Chao, Mitchell Lichtenstein (director of Teeth), and Lee mainstay Lung Sihung, The Wedding Banquet is a bracingly funny and tender look at the imperfect path to love and happiness in the new world.
QUEER CINEMA, TOP TO BOTTOM at Museum of the Moving Image
For much of cinema’s history, queerness was woven secretly into its fabric. As the decades wore on, and as queer artists wrestled with often inhospitable cultures and government or industry restrictions loosened, they began to assert their perspectives and sensibilities, playing with aesthetics to articulate a sense of queerness, decisively and cinematically. To mark the release of The Queer Film Guide: 100 Films That Tell LGBTQIA+ Stories, out May 16 from Smith Street Books and RIzzoli, author and critic Kyle Turner has guest programmed a selection of films that epitomize the complex, contradictory, and compelling ways queerness finds itself as code, language, or point of view, and underline how cinema can look back at itself, disassembling notions of desire, selfhood, and identity. These ten films are separated into three categories for your viewing pleasure: vers (Mulholland Drive, The Watermelon Woman), bottom (Morocco, Rope, The Fly, Jennifer’s Body), and top (Nitrate Kisses, Farewell My Concubine, Querelle, O Fantasma).
QUEER CINEMA, TOP TO BOTTOM
May 19 — Jul 2, 2023