#304
Post
by feihong » Fri Oct 04, 2024 1:16 am
There is a new blu-ray of Shunji Iwai's Swallowtail Butterfly, released in China by Welcome Music. Welcome is the company that released Suzhou River in advance of the superior Radiance disc. Swallowtail Butterfly does not have English subtitles––nor did it when it was released on blu ray in Japan 11 years ago (by now, however there are a gazillion repackaged versions of the Japanese disc with English subtitles added, for sale on different platforms).
The Pony Canyon disc from Japan was of exceptionally poor quality, even for 2013. It did better at separating colors, at image stability, and it looked sharper than Panorama DVD from Hong Kong (the last time the film had an English subtitle track), but it looked like it wasn't made from a hi-definition source. So how does the new Welcome Music disc measure up? Does it improve upon the picture quality of a poor disc, released 11 years ago?
Well...certainly not as much as one would like. There has clearly not been any new scan; Welcome is working with the same elements as Pony Canyon had. There have been some improvements, however. The best is that the color seems more saturated and cleaner in its delineation. There appears to be some...sharpening? Edge enhancement? These two things combined give us an image that seems much clearer to "read" in a movie with famously specific and challenging cinematography. The movies shot by Noboru Shinoda have always looked murky, in all sorts of different home video versions. I once read he was originally a cinematographer on documentary films, but I have never seen a listing of what those films might have been. From his filmography, it seems his first assignment as dp was Shinji Somai's Love Hotel, and that his later oeuvre included Sogo Ishii's 1/2 Man, Katsuhiro Otomo's live-action movie of the Satoshi Kon manga, World Apartment Horror, Somai's The Friends, and then he shoots all of Shunji Iwai's theatrical films starting with his first, Undo, and proceeding to the last one Shinoda lives to shoot, Hana & Alice. I've never seen one of these pictures in 35mm, so I don't have a great sense of what they're supposed to look like, but most of them include the same sorts of techniques: soft-focus photography, an emphasis and browns and blues in the image, blown-out backlighting, and restless camera mobility. A lot of this has continued in Iwai's later movies, but the Shinoda ones have the most extreme representations of this look––the only variation is in which of these different motifs gets cranked up the highest. In addition, Swallowtail itself has a lot of experimentation, with footage that has extreme color corrections, a little bit of cgi (seemingly the only time in Iwai's career?). Probably the best presentation of what this cinematography is supposed to look like is the Jpanese blu ray of Hana & Alice, and in that version, the blown-out whites are very clearly white light. Every other home video representation of these films I've seen, the blown-out white light has a blue tint to it. Maybe that comes from compression? I don't know. Suffice to say, the Welcome Music disc has a bias for blue, even in these white lights. There is a lot of middle-grey tones throughout the film. In every other version of the movie I've seen, the image is quite murky. The scene in the graveyard, for instance, has always been impossible to make out. On this disc it is much, much clearer, and you can read facial expressions on the character in the scene. Also, the sequence where one of the characters reaches into a dead man's stomach, which used to be almost completely black screen, is now visible in gut-churning glory. In general, the daytime outdoor scenes look a lot better than any of the indoor scenes. Another result of the marginally improved picture quality is that Ayumi Ito's butterfly tattoo is quite obviously a rub-on tattoo in closeup, which is, I suppose, unavoidable, but also kind of hilarious, since it's so central to the film's main themes and motifs.
I'll post some shot comparisons later, but I wanted to share it here, just because, when do you get a new release of Swallowtail Butterfly? Once a decade, maybe. What will it ever take to see this film closer to the way it was meant to be seen? This version is much more enjoyable to watch than the Pony Canyon disc, but at the same time, the characters all look flat, waxy, and very pale. What depth there might be in the image has never been very visible. So it's at once an improvement and a disappointment.
