804 A Brighter Summer Day

[feihong]

And that's an incredible cover. Was it an unused poster image? It's so much stronger than any of the ones I've seen before, the best of which is the extreme close-up of Chang Chen, which is nothing special.

My impression from Taiwanese friends was that the criminal case the film dramatizes was very well-known in Taiwan, even nowadays, and that there's some kind of tag line on many of the posters for the film which invokes this, I believe? So I think the Taiwanese art for the film was reliant on the collective memory to do the promotion of the film. The image of Chang Chen on most of these is meant to be like that kind of poster where you're saying "This is about this famous crime this guy did," and then the image presented is saying "This is the guy that did it." The posters here do scream distress at the audience, in a way. In each instance, we're supposed to stare at the kid's face and feel as if something's not right.

Of course, for an audience who doesn't make that immediate connection to the source story, something with a more overt thematic concept, like the Criterion cover, makes a lot more sense. Still, they're lucky they aren't trying to make a smash of the movie with this cover. It's brilliant, but it's hardly commercial.

My favorite of these release posters is the Japanese one, on the far right––I have a chirashi of it, in fact. The image of Liu Zhiming is quite faded next to the over contrasted image of Chang Chen. The juxtaposition of the images is tense and disquieting. It's hardly a commercial image, either, though, I think. Whenever the imagery tries to convey some of the subtlety of the movie, that seems to take it out of the realm of commercial graphics in some way. Some of these posters go for a more gonzo, "ripped from the headlines" style of delivery. It's funny to imagine a viewer going in with salacious expectations and emerging, 4 hours later...in what sort of state? It's hard to imagine.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

My impression from Taiwanese friends was that the criminal case the film dramatizes was very well-known in Taiwan, even nowadays, and that there's some kind of tag line on many of the posters for the film which invokes this, I believe?

It's actually the title of the film that invokes it: "The Guling Street Juvenile Murder Incident." But while there really was a juvenile murder incident on Guling Street in 1960, the film doesn't hew closely to what actually happened; Yang just remembered hearing about the murder (it involved students from his school) and basically imagined what sequence of events could've led up to it, mixing in some autobiographical elements.

[oh yeah]

Not many things make me exclaim aloud "FUCK YEAH!" but seeing this topic with the spine number next to the title certainly did.

Long overdue, to say the least, but I couldn't be happier it's coming. Easily one of my most-anticipated films, I'm glad I didn't cave and watch the weak laserdisc transfer. I'd blind-buy this one even if the disc was packaged in a moldy gym sock.

[tenia]

It's nice to see the Blu ray is 2 discs (dvd is 3). Figured they would have jammed the film on one with a handful of features.

Let's hope that the encoding is improved then...it's an encouraging sign at least.

The movie is almost 4 hours long (237 min) and there seems to be 2 hours and a half of extras. It's not surprising they chose to split the extras from the movie. They did it with Heaven's Gate despite the extras being quite short and the movie being 20 min shorter than A Bright Summer Day.

[nissling]

I believe this is the one that's floating around with both Taiwanese and English subtitles (and presumably from a laserdisc? -- Wonder what the 3-hour cut is sourced from).

The film was distributed on Laserdisc in Hong Kong in early 90s and is almost impossible to find. The three hours cut was shown at various theaters around the world, including Sweden. Don't think this film has been shown here since.

Now I can finally put away my old Laserdisc (and player) for good and wait for this promising release. Criterion finally got it right. A Brighter Summer Day is clearly among my top five favorite films of all time.

[colinr0380]

I'm really glad for the chance to finally see the four hour version of the film!

So, the shorter (I believe three hour?) cut has also been floating around the backchannels? If so, I did not know this... Would've been interesting if Criterion were able to include it.

(Does anyone know the story behind this cut? Studio-imposed? Did Yang disown it?)

I don't know about the back channels but the BBC screened, just the once, the three hour version back in early 1996 as part of their "BBC100" series of films. The screen captures in the Edward Yang thread are from my ropey VHS tape recorded from that screening.

[Emilio]

It's nice to see the Blu ray is 2 discs (dvd is 3). Figured they would have jammed the film on one with a handful of features.

Let's hope that the encoding is improved then...it's an encouraging sign at least.

The movie is almost 4 hours long (237 min) and there seems to be 2 hours and a half of extras. It's not surprising they chose to split the extras from the movie. They did it with Heaven's Gate despite the extras being quite short and the movie being 20 min shorter than A Bright Summer Day.

Thanks. Anyhow, I humbly take my hat off for Criterion's persistence over the years for this release!

[Zot!]

And that's an incredible cover. Was it an unused poster image? It's so much stronger than any of the ones I've seen before, the best of which is the extreme close-up of Chang Chen, which is nothing special.

Could it be a nicely staged new image? Kind of like Shallow Grave? I don't remember the film well enough to know if this has to be an original still.

[domino harvey]

The Criterion site cites Yang as the photographer

[FrauBlucher]

A video clip added to it's page.

[WmS]

I watched the Criterion blu-ray last night after winning a pre-release copy at the Wexner Center restoration talk with Lee Kline & Phoebe Harmon of the Criterion Collection.

It's amazing.

This is the restoration footnote:

Kline & Harmon showed a number of clips from the restoration in 4K DCP, and the difference is profound. Apparently the negative suffered from mold in addition to the standard problems of a 25-year old film print from the tropics. One challenge was that it had 4 different cinematographers, some of whom were apparently inexperienced, and many of the shots were underexposed. There was also an issue getting the negative out of Taiwan to Italy, since none of the labs in Taiwan were equipped to handle film this fragile or damaged. Also, "There are two rights holders, and they don't like each other" was how Lee Kline put it, so it took some wrangling to get it to Italy for the wet-gate scan. (This was before Cineteca di Bologna opened their Hong Kong office.)

That said, there is one shot in the 4-hour restoration which is imperfect because the available elements were damaged. They showed the damaged shot from the negative: the emulsion from the head leader basically fused with the emulsion in the shot where they were touching when spooled, so you can see the girl in the shot running up the stairs, but about 80% of the image is white blobs & the number "3" in a big fat font. So that's ruined. To correct it they returned to the previous restoration (from the early 2000s) and upscaled the HD image (maybe it was 2K, I can't recall which, but it's not like there's much difference). It's a lot darker than the rest of the movie, less sharp, and just inferior all around. Kilne gave a not entirely satisfying explanation that they theoretically could have tried to get an interpositive sent from Taiwan but there was no guarantee the rights holders would let it out again. I suspect there is much more to the story which can't be told. Of course, were there a blu-ray extra of key Criterion staffers going into Triad-infested Taipei to rescue 90 seconds of film, done in the style of an 80s HK action film, that would be nice. I wish this restoration were perfectly perfect, but it's almost perfect, and has a visible reminder that movies like this are fragile not just physically, since the logistics, politics, and happenstance of their making and archiving can determine their legacy.

I don't see this story mentioned in the notes or the extras, which is unfortunate. Maybe Tony Rayns mentions it somewhere in his four-hour commentary.

All that said, the disc looks phenomenal-- I watched it projected to about 120". Lots of grain, very filmic. One of the things I absolutely love about the restoration is how, despite stabilizing jitter out of many shots, they left in little camera shakes that were caused by the operators. They talked a couple of times about the temptation to make restored films more perfect than they were when first released. (Apparently David Lynch asked if they could remove someone's glasses in a shot in Eraserhead.) Here they didn't. A Brighter Summer Day looks magnificent, but like a film made by hand by a crew of 60% first-timers.

At which point I should say it was like watching this utter masterpiece again for the very first time. Especially since I have only seen it before on the Superhappyfun DVD bootleg of the old laserdisc. The way Yang uses the frame, especially on that climactic shot, I can't imagine watching this on a smaller screen. I hope Wexner books it soon. Maybe late August, early September?

[FrauBlucher]

Wms, thanks for that. Awesome stuff. I do hope that Tony Rayns gives us a lot of the backstory.

[Trees]

I can't even say how much I am looking forward to this release!!!!!! "Terrorizers" and "Yi Yi" really blew me away. I'm super psyched for "A Brighter Summer Day".

[criterionsnob]

Beaver

[oh yeah]

Just when I thought I couldn't get more excited for this...

[denti alligator]

Just for shock effect I'd like to see a screen cap comparison between the Criterion Blu and the old bootleg that was floating around.

[swo17]

What, like this?

[nissling]

I digitized my Laserdisc about a year ago (for private use only) as it was the best source for the film and here's a comparison to the Blu-Ray. Very green picture, the black balance must have been messed up with my Crystalio.

[TMDaines]

I prefer the old transfer.

[nissling]

Hah, are you for real? Do you think a run-of-the-mill Hong Kong Laserdisc from the early 90s is more accurate to what Yang wanted the film to look like than a brand new 4K restoration? As the owner of hundreds of Laserdiscs, more than a thousand DVDs and even more hundreds of Blu-Rays I must say the whole "Old transfer is better" debate has very little to nothing to do with which is the most accurate representation.

[TMDaines]

Click the link and you'll see that I'm joking!

[nissling]

Read your posts, and I now see what you mean. Sorry for misunderstanding.

[Trees]

Beautiful! Absolutely massive improvement.

[jojo]

Hah, are you for real? Do you think a run-of-the-mill Hong Kong Laserdisc from the early 90s is more accurate to what Yang wanted the film to look like than a brand new 4K restoration? As the owner of hundreds of Laserdiscs, more than a thousand DVDs and even more hundreds of Blu-Rays I must say the whole "Old transfer is better" debate has very little to nothing to do with which is the most accurate representation.

Picture is not green enough now. Asian films are supposed to look greener.

[nissling]

Made some quick adjustments in the settings for my old Laserdisc and picture got better colors. This makes it a fair game but the Blu-Ray is such a vast improvement and overall holds very good standard for the medium in general making a Laserdisc more or less pointless by now.



On the other hand, other than this LD (which took me years to find and costed me much more than any sane person would've paid) my only alternative was a Video CD. In fact my first viewing of the film was specifically on VCD and picture was throughout awful. So bad that the LD looks like 4K in comparison. Even so I found the film already then to be one of my all time favorites.