TEXT CHOSEN:
I have chosen the film Funeral Parade of Roses to close-read for my midterm.
DESCRIPTION/SUMMARY:
Funeral Parade of Roses is a 1969 Japanese art-house film about a trans sex-worker named Eddy and her ascent through the ranks of the queer underbelly of ’60s Tokyo. It is a loose retelling of the ancient Greek play Oedipus Rex. I believe it is one of the earliest examples of depicting queer people, especially trans people, holistically. That is, it shows queer people as people who suffer the agonies and ecstasies of being human just like everyone else.
AUDIENCE SPECULATION:
The intended audience I am imagining for my close-reading essay is fellow queer people around my age who may not have delved into the history of queer art, or who may not know that boundary-breaking pieces of queer art are far from a new development.
FORMAL AND GENERIC CONVENTIONS:
The 2-3 formally/generically similar texts I have discovered through research are: My Own Private Idaho by Gus Van Sant and The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.
Although the former is a film and the latter is a book, both share the premise of adapting a well-established story and re-telling it through a lens of queerness. My Own Private Idaho is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, while The Song of Achilles retells the myth of Achilles and Patroclus as an overtly queer love story (rather than the covertly queer story of the original).
Fuller, Graham (1993). “Gus Van Sant: Swimming Against the Current”. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and My Own Private Idaho. Faber & Faber. pp. xxv.
I intend to talk about Funeral Parade of Roses in relation to themes of the fluidity of identity and the limiting nature of labels, especially given that this is an over 50 year old film. I think that my object intersects with class in that it provides a much older look at how people thought about queerness, gender identity, sex, and the innate humanity that binds us all together.
QUESTIONS:
I do not know how to approach choosing a single “passage” from the film to analyze. It would probably be easier to just tackle the whole thing, but I’m not sure if that’s really following the prompt.