"For My Crushed Right Eye – The Visionary Films of Toshio Matsumoto"

Start
18 Sep 2011
End
19 Sep 2011
Location
Harvard Film Archive 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

THE HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE PRESENTS

"For My Crushed Right Eye – The Visionary Films of Toshio Matsumoto"

SEPTEMBER 18 – SEPTEMBER 19

Screening Schedule:
FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES
Featuring Toshio Matsumoto in person with film historian and curator Go Hirasawa
SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 18 AT 7PM

SHORT FILMS
Featuring Toshio Matsumoto in person with film historian and curator Go Hirasawa
MONDAY SEPTEMBER 19 AT 7PM
For My Crushed Right Eye (Tsuburekakatta migime no tame ni)
Japan 1969, 16mm for three projectors, color, 13 min.

Silver Wheel (Ginrin)
Japan 1955, 35mm, b/w, 12 min.

Song of the Stone (Ishi no Uta)
Japan 1963, 16mm, b/w, 24 min.

Ecstasis
Japan 1969, 16mm, b/w, 11 min.

Atman
Japan 1975, 16mm, color, 12 min.

Everything Visible Is Empty
(Shiki soku ze ku)
Japan 1975, 16mm, color, 8 min.

Harvard Film Archive
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
(617) 495-4700
hcl.harvard.edu/hfa
General Admission Tickets $9, $7 Non-Harvard Students, Seniors, Harvard Faculty and Staff. Harvard students free

Special event tickets (for in-person appearances) are $12.
Tickets go on sale 45 minutes prior to show time. The HFA does not do advance ticket sales.

About the filmmaker:

One of the great pioneers of Sixties counter-cinema, Japanese director, video artist and critic Toshio Matsumoto (b. 1932) rose to prominence as a daring stylist and fearless provocateur whose radically experimental films shattered social and aesthetic taboos with inspired precision and energy. Matsumoto began as a documentary filmmaker, directing a series of abstract and subtly political shorts that applied a mode of poetic anthropology to postwar society and culture. Among Matsumoto’s earliest works were two important collaborations with fellow member of the Jikken-Kobo artist collective, the legendary composer Toru Takemitsu who contributed some of his earliest scores to Matsumoto’s lyrical documentaries Ginrin and Song of the Stone. An influential critic and theorist, Matsumoto increasingly embraced formal experimentation, culminating in his dazzling three projector film, For My Crushed Right Eye and his incendiary feature film debut, Funeral Parade of Roses, one of the most important films produced by the remarkable independent distribution and production company Art Theater Guild. Making prominent use of music and mandala-like formal structures, Matsumoto’s deeply immersive and frequently psychedelic avant-garde films are trance inducing and quietly intense adventures in perception.

The Harvard Film Archive is thrilled to welcome one of the leading figures of Japanese experimental cinema for a special presentation of his incredible yet rarely screened films followed by a conversation with film historian and curator Go Hirasawa.

A carnivalesque melding of documentary verité and avant-garde psychedelia, Funeral Parade of Roses offers a shocking and ecstatic journey through the nocturnal underworld of Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood, following the strange misadventures of a rebellious drag queen fending off his/her rivals. Often cited as a major inspiration for Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Matsumoto’s breakthrough film is a visually audacious and lyrically abstract testament to the vertiginous daring of the postwar Japanese avant-garde art and film scenes. Matsumoto orchestrates a series of quite astonishing visual set pieces, including actual performances by the influential Fluxus-inspired street theater groups, the Zero Jigen and Genpei Akasegawa.
Directed by Toshio Matsumoto. With Pîtâ, Osamu Ogasawara, Toyosaburo Uchiyama
Japan 1969, 35mm, b/w, 105 min.

This press release is available for download on the press page of the Harvard Film Archive’s website: http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/general_info.html#press. The user name and password are hfapress. Please contact bgravely@fas.harvard.edu for screeners, additional photos, or more information.

Press Contact:
Brittany Gravely
Publicist
Harvard Film Archive
24 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
617-496-3211
bgravely@fas.harvard.edu

THE JAPAN SOCIETY OF BOSTON