Edward Yang on DVD

[King of Kong]

Have any fellow antipodeans seen this R4 Yi Yi DVD? It's been out for a while though there aren't that many review of it on the net.

I've been waiting to see this film for a long time and hope the transfer is decent. The R1 looks awful. I don't know about the R2. The R3 transfer looks good but doesn't seem to have a Yang commentary.

Yeah...

[DDillaman]

I've got the Korean R3 and am reasonably happy with it, though yeah I would like to have the commentary on the R1. Does the R4 have the commentary, then?

[King of Kong]

I've got the Korean R3 and am reasonably happy with it, though yeah I would like to have the commentary on the R1. Does the R4 have the commentary, then?

I think it does, yeah. On the surface it seems like a port of the R2, though I can't be sure about the transfer.

[King of Kong]

Late reply. I have the R4 version and it is quite poor (overcompressed.)

Thanks for the warning. I might go for the R2 then...

[Napoleon]

If you mean this one, then I would advise you not to bother. I've had it 2 years and have aborted watching it 3 times due to the appalling sub-VHS visual quality. Nice menu's though.

[King of Kong]

If you mean this one, then I would advise you not to bother. I've had it 2 years and have aborted watching it 3 times due to the appalling sub-VHS visual quality. Nice menu's though.

Again, cheers for the tip. Might do with the R3...

ADDENDUM: Aw crap, it's out of print.... I'll keep looking though - is it available anywhere?

[obloquy]

If you find the R3, please post where. I've been looking for it, too. I've watched my shitty R1 twice, but the muddy quality tends to give me a headache.

[whaleallright]

n/a

[denti alligator]

Thanks for these links!
For that price it's almost worth buying without knowing if it (Terrorizers) has English subs.

I ordered a 2-DVD copy of Brighter Summer Day from superhappyfun that supposedly has good picture quality and English subs. Should arrive any day and I'll report back.

Why is Yang so woefully underrepresented on DVD? It almost makes me angry at Criterion for putting out yet another Bergman. C'mon, folks, let's get a delux box set of Yang's films! Masters of Cinema?

[htdm]

Does anyone know if the new Taiwanese DVD of "The Terrorizers" has English subtitles? YesAsia.com says "no" but they are not always accurate.

This version does not have English subs. There was a VHS version with subs and I've been told an LD is out there too although I've never seen it.

numerous classic Taiwanese films have been released on DVD in the last year--I suspect these may have English subtitles, if only because the titles are typically printed in English on the cover.

Unfortunately, the covers are misleading as most of these releases do not have English subs. But if you read Chinese, almost all do have Chinese subs. That said, there are a few exceptions -- Oyster Girl, In Our Time, and I believe Vive L'Amour all have English subs burnt in to the original print that was used. Almost none of the others do. It is so nice to see that they are releasing some fine films (along with some not so fine ones) such as Song of the Exile, The Strawman, and Banana Paradise.

If you are interested in taking a crash course on pre-New Wave Taiwan Film that won't break the bank, you should check out this set. There was a volume one that is now OOP and volume three was released last year, but it looks like YesAsia doesn't carry it. As I mentioned, almost none of the films will have subs and most are brutally P&S'd from their OAR, but...how else are you going to see them? And especially for about the price of a bad date.

Getting back to Edward Yang -- for a discussion of the best DVD versions of his work available (most are in Japan) see this thread.

[Telstar]

Argh! I just received The Sandwich Man from yesasia and popped it into the DVD player only to find that there are No English subs! What a disappointment (and a waste of money)...

jonah.77, where did your info about those burnt-in titles come from?...

[Michael Kerpan]

I think one can probably find a synopsis of Sandwich Man somewhere online. I didn't find this too hard to follow without subs (oncwe I knew what was more or less going on). Only the first segment is by HHH -- the other two aren't nearly so memorable.

[kieslowski_67]

Why is Yang so woefully underrepresented on DVD? It almost makes me angry at Criterion for putting out yet another Bergman. C'mon, folks, let's get a delux box set of Yang's films! Masters of Cinema?

His films are a little bit too traditonal in narration (compared to other "modern" Asian film makers) to be liked by general art film fans, and the lack of name actors, violence, sex and nudity also means low interest to Western film distributors.

BTW, the new DVD of "the terrorists" has no English sub and feature a terrible, VHS quality transfer. Avoid it at any cost unless you are a hardcore Yang fan.

[Stagger Lee]

denti: How did the superhappyfun disc turn out?

Anyone know anything about this one?

[Biomik]

Brighter Summer Day is supposedly very good film, but watching this DVD was awful experience for me and I could not appreciate the film at all. Everything (video, audio, subtitles) are just horrible. I would recommend for people who like Edward Yang to wait for better edition and don't go for this one just because it is the only one out there at the moment.

[feihong]

I think the Superhappyfun disc comes from the 4-volume HK VCD or the identical Taiwanese DVD of the movie. You were expecting DVD, so I can understand your disappointment. But the movie is very great, and it deserves Criterion-style cleaning-up and a real DVD release. A pity Yang is no longer with us, but someone ought to get Chang Chen to give an audio commentary. That would be cool.

But also, even though Hou Hsiao-Hsien got that lovely 4-film box set, the quality of most DVDs of Taiwanese movies released today is only acceptable for watching on a small tube television. Their fate reflects the fate of most independently-produced movies in the DVD era--just try and find good discs of King Hu films! There's like, maybe 2 quality discs out there, and no one in charge of anything seems to care.

[zedz]

I think the Superhappyfun disc comes from the 4-volume HK VCD or the identical Taiwanese DVD of the movie. You were expecting DVD, so I can understand your disappointment. But the movie is very great, and it deserves Criterion-style cleaning-up and a real DVD release.

I assume the disc we're talking about is the same one I saw recently, which is a pretty poor representation of this masterpiece. Sure, you can get an idea Yang's brilliant structure and narrative organisation, but most of the visual and soundtrack subtleties (which carry much of the burden of the former) are completely lost. It worked for me as an aide-memoire of the 35mm, but as a first encounter with the film it would be rather brutal.

For anyone who is still brave enough to approach A Brighter Summer Day from this back alley, it's a film that really benefits from keeping a scorecard (seriously!) A lot of its brilliance comes from the unforced ways in which connections between the characters are slowly elaborated, so keeping track of who everybody is and their relationships to others reveals an entire world behind the scenes. Keep an eye on the flashlight and what it reveals as well, as patterns of light and darkness (and vision / obscured vision, or in the case of this transfer light-coloured mud and dark-coloured mud) are also essential to the film.

[Lemmy Caution]

There are a number of Yang Dvd's which have just turned up here recently. One is a two-disc affair combining two films. The quality seemed fairly decent, but only one of the two films had English subtitles. A third Yang film was available separately. I believe The Terroriser [Kongbu fenzi (1986)] was the separate film and had English subs.

Lord, I had a rough time trying to figure these discs out.
First off, they are released by Uplink from Japan and seem to be licensed from Cine Quanan, whatever label that is. Part of their Edward Yang Collection.

I only found one disc, which also contains two films. The prints looked fine enough if a little dark, but it's hard to evaluate on the cruddy 15" Tv's at the store.
The cover lists the 2 films as:
Don't You Break My Heart & Couples.
But after selecting between the two films, I could never get back to that original menu choice, using the stores unfamiliar remote control.
Break My Heart only had Chinese and Japanese subtitles. Couples seems to have an alternate English name "Confucian Confusion," which I believe is originally Duli Shidai (1994). I couldn't get any of the subtitles to work, but am sure it has Chinese subs.

I never did find the other disc, which also contains 2 films -- The Terrorizer [Kongbu fenzi (1986)] and another film --one of which definitely has English subs and one without (I checked it in store previously).

Anyway, alot of effort for little information.
Next time, I'll copy down the Chinese names and dates. But really it's only important if there are English subs.

Does anyone have a listing of Yang films with bot their English and Chinese names? Or at least a good list of their English names?

[Michael Kerpan]

But also, even though Hou Hsiao-Hsien got that lovely 4-film box set.

HHH's own company put together that set -- and his plans for further volumes obviously never materialized.

[ltfontaine]

Jonathan Rosenbaum breaks down some of the more commonly available versions of A Brighter Summer Day in his Global Discoveries column in Cinema Scope.

It appears that, somewhere along the line, the source for the asiafilm edition was a print projected and filmed from the screen, as subtitles that begin below the frame are manually cranked up into view to compensate for an inappropriately sized aperture plate.

[zedz]

Does anyone have a listing of Yang films with bot their English and Chinese names? Or at least a good list of their English names?

There aren't that many to choose from, so hopefully you'll be able to sort them out:

In Our Time / Guangyinde gushi (portmanteau film, Yang does the last episode)
That Day, on the Beach / Haitan de yitian
Taipei Story / Qingmei zhuma
The Terrorizer(s) / Kongbu fenzi (also goes under different variations - Terrorist, Terrorists etc)
A Brighter Summer Day / Guling jie shaonian sha ren shijian
A Confucian Confusion / Duli shidai
Mahjong
YiYi

While we're at it, can anyone tell me what the translation of A Brighter Summer Day's Chinese title is? If it's a literal translation of the English, that's quite bizarre, as the significance of the title is its wonky Englishness (this is not a summer movie).

[ltfontaine]

While we're at it, can anyone tell me what the translation of A Brighter Summer Day's Chinese title is? If it's a literal translation of the English, that's quite bizarre, as the significance of the title is its wonky Englishness (this is not a summer movie).

The title is a line from the song, "Are You Lonely Tonight," by Elvis Presley, whose letter to Cat states that the King is surprised to learn that anyone is listening to his music on Taiwan, that "tiny unknown island."

[zedz]

The title is a line from the song, "Are You Lonely Tonight," by Elvis Presley.

Almost. It's a mistranscription (by Xiao-S'ir's sister? - somebody's sister, anyway) of the 'Are You Lonesome Tonight' lyric. It was the Chinese title I was wondering about.

[ptmd]

The Chinese name of A Brighter Summer's Day means "Rebel Without a Cause" and it uses the same characters used for Nicholas Ray's film of the same name. As an almost wholly nocturnal film about adolescent confusion and violence from roughly the same period, Ray's film is the key cinematic point of reference for Yang's epic (although his use of the title is, of course, also ironic).

[ltfontaine]

The title is a line from the song, "Are You Lonely Tonight," by Elvis Presley.

Almost. It's a mistranscription (by Xiao-S'ir's sister? - somebody's sister, anyway) of the 'Are You Lonesome Tonight' lyric. It was the Chinese title I was wondering about.

The title, in English anyway, is not a mistranscription, but an accurate rendering of the lyric as Elvis sings it on the RCA Victor recording from 1960 that S'ir and one of the other boys (Airplane?) are listening to, and attempting to translate with dictionary in hand, on the night that S'ir's father is taken away for questioning. "Does your memory stray to a brighter summer day / When I kissed you and called you sweetheart?" It's a title that carries so much resonance in the context of the film that I assumed the Chinese title was a literal translation.