Funeral Parade of Roses (Fri., Sept. 22, 8 p.m., $5, The Cinema, 3925 Walnut St.) Kicking off a farewell weekend of video screenings at West Philly's Cinema (né Cinemagic), this recently rediscovered eye-bender is a violently Freudian head trip that fuses the over-the-top intensity of Branded to Kill with the apocalyptic poetry of Gimme Shelter. Echoing the skull-bong vibe of American late-'60s disillusionment, Toshio Matsumoto views 1969 Tokyo through a haze of pot smoke and burning celluloid. The transvestite entertainer Peter, best known as the androgynous fool in Kurosawa's Ran, stars as a comely cross-dresser named Eddie who is caught in a gangland menage-a-trois. But Eddie's story, which progresses in fitful and sometimes unintelligible snippets, is really a pretext for Matsumoto to explore Tokyo's gay subculture, as well as cozing up to a group of experimental filmmakers whose work sometimes takes over the screen without warning.

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Furiously mixing media, Parade shifts from expressionist black and white (well-represented on a DVD taken from the director's personal print) to quasi-documentary interludes where Matsumoto interviews disillusioned Japanese youth and even members of the cast. One erotic interlude is interrupted by an abrupt pull-back that reveals a turtleneck-clad director (presumably Matsumoto) hovering over a writhing, half-clothed Peter. Inauthenticity is everywhere, not least among the self-proclaimed rebels. One camera-wielding hipster dubs himself Guevara, pasting on a fake beard that falls off when he sneezes.

Dipping into Greek mythology as well as Japanese popular culture (although you'd probably need the British DVD with subtitled commentary to unpack all the references), Funeral Parade is alternately haunting and frenetic, a ghost story for a generation still twitching on the slab. Clinging to appropriated identities, the film's wayward youth wind up in a flooded graveyard, where Eddie muses, "I wish the whole world would sink."

Ranging from frank lyricism to aortic Grand Guignol, Funeral Parade sets the stage for a weekend that includes Lucio Fulci's New York Ripper (Sept. 22), Michael Powell's Age of Consent (Sept. 23) and Floyd Mutrux's Aloha, Bobby and Rose (Sept. 24). Complete schedule at www.shermanarts.org.

Termite TV: Democracy (Sun., Sept. 24, 2:30 p.m., free, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th St. and the Parkway) We don't hear from Termite TV as often as we used to, but it's always a pleasure when the mound breaks ground. The latest from the Philly-born, globe-spanning collective follows the group's characteristic variations-on-a-theme approach, although the variations fall within a narrower span this time around. The most revealing juxtaposition comes early on, a cut from a first-person account of the obstacles to getting Green Party candidates on the Pennsylvania ballot to man-on-the-street interviews with Polish voters who don't yet equate the ballot with true democracy. In the U.S., third-party candidates require 30 times the signatures of Democrats or Republicans, ostensibly to avoid "clutter" on the ballot, and Democrats intent on getting Republicans out of office harangue the Green canvasser for undermining the cause. In Poland, the citizens seem engaged in a much fuller examination of what democracy actually means, or at least some of them do. One young woman observes, "Before democracy, things were pretty lame. Everyone dressed the same."

Screening with Democracy, which inaugurates a new series called "Life-Size Action Pictures," are a half-dozen companion shorts, which range from an animated history of voting technologies to a documentary on the Prometheus Radio Project starting up a community station in Tanzania.