Perversions Of Grandeur With Toshio Matsumoto

Can anyone honestly say we’d have Kubrick’s pop-art nightmare A Clockwork Orange without Matsumoto’s ground-breaking Funeral Parade Of Roses that came out two years prior?

A filmmaker that inspired as many Hollywood’s legends, as up-and-coming avant-garde auteurs (even if they won’t admit it), Toshio Matsumoto may not be the most famous name in the Japanese new-wave canon, but he’s certainly the most infamous.

From a gender-bending take on Oedipus Rex (featuring an iconic performance by early trans actress Shinnosuke Ikehata) to early ground-breaking experimentation with video tape, in some ways this fine artist’s work is more at home with Duchamp than any post-modern filmmakers. Matsumoto’s work is a perverse explosion of stimulation and complex themes of identity, using fast-cuts, rotoscoping, time manipulation, and splashes of kaleidoscopic colors that makes the viewer’s experience a sinful indulgence, with an entire filmography that feels like it was soaked in a beaker full of LSD.

Through strobing flickers of brilliance and a choreography of controlled chaos, Matsumoto creates a unified collection of works waiting to be rediscovered.