804 A Brighter Summer Day

[Trees]

Dammit, so "A Brighter Summer Day" is playing this weekend in New York. I wish I had known.... I would have made plans to attend.

Details here

Accompanying review from the Guardian.

[AK]

At the screening of A Brighter Summer Day in Bologna, during last week Cinema Ritrovato Festival...

The only thing for me to do before DHL should deliver the film (24 hours maybe?) is to giddily reread this thread. And I'm so lucky I didn't notice sharunasbresson's quote (from July 2009) earlier, because I would have been grumpy for many years - the thing is, I moved to Bologna in August that same year, and it would have given me an existential crisis or two to think I had just missed Yang's film.

Oh, and another antidote is Yi yi. And thank you Chris for a thorough review!

[Trees]

If anyone here has not yet seen "The Terrorizers", I highly recommend it. Based on some of zedz' writing, I felt like I wanted to see "Terrorizers" before "Brighter Summer Day". There is a nice 720p copy of "Terrorizers" floating around some Chinese sites.

My Amazon tracking says "Brighter Summer Day" will be here tomorrow.

[whaleallright]

jsdvd.com still has copies of the Blu-Ray of The Terrorizers, last I checked.

[movielocke]

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

It's because Asians have copper in their blood, not iron!

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

jsdvd.com still has copies of the Blu-Ray of The Terrorizers, last I checked.

Not anymore—it's "out of stock" now. Yesasia says it's "temporarily out of stock," but one major Taiwanese e-tailer (Books.com.tw) no longer has a listing for it, and Eslite (the biggest bookstore chain in the country) has a listing but won't even take backorders for it. I hope it's just between pressings.

[whaleallright]

My impression was that it went out of print some time ago, but that a few retailers still had a few copies. Perhaps that is no longer true.

[knives]

The Blu is OOP, but the DVD is still in print.

[Zot!]

Vivel'amour and dust on the wind bds got repackaged, so you can still hope I guess.

[andyli]

I watched A Brighter Summer Day yesterday and can happily report that the release exceeds my expectation in almost every respect. Early accounts from people who attend the screening indicate that the restoration is still uneven, but the only problematic scene I can identify when viewing it on my setup is

Spoiler

the scene right after the climactic stabbing, when Si'r's family members rush to the police station, which lasts for about half a minute

, which has a dupey look and might be from elements generations away from the OCN. Overall, the color is good (no teal-push whatsoever), sound is clear and the four hours simply soar by.

The film deserves multiple viewings, now that we can see pretty much everything going on. For me, at least one more viewing with a comprehensive Chinese subtitle (even as a native Chinese, I can't understand all dialects in the film, yet they are such an integral part of the film's theme and crucial to the film's verisimilitude), and another viewing with Tony Rayns' epic length commentary.

Some notes on the names and puns in the film that might add to your viewing experience:

- The Zhang family nick-name their children in a typical fashion from the Chinese culture: according to the children's birth order, so Lao Er simply means 'second born' (which is also a vulgar name for the male genital, more or less equivalent to 'dick' in English---this was used as a pun at a certain point of the plot), and Si'r means 'fourth born'. Si'r's formal name, Zhang Zhen, is of course the real name of the portraying actor.

- The antagonizing gang's head Shandong gets his name from a mainland province. If I'm not mistaken, the accent of the doorman from the film studio (the first dialect to appear in the film) is also from Shandong, and Tsingtao, a Shandong city, is the topic of one conversation we heard in the film. In addition, according to the original news report, the victim of the real incident is a girl whose family came from Shandong province.

- The night school they attend is called Jianguo, which means 'establishing a nation', a fairly typical name for a school in both Taiwan and Mainland China, I should add. In contrast, the name of the street Si'r's family live on, Guling (prominently present in the Chinese title of the film), is fairly local.

- The reference to animal is abundant: Cat, Tiger are of course the nicknames of Si'r's friends, the surname Ma simply means 'horse', and---perhaps a pure coincidence---the street name Guling means 'the mountain of cattle'. Interestingly, there is almost no animal showing up in the film, except for a pet dog General Ma's family kept as far as I can remember.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

The Blu is OOP, but the DVD is still in print.

Well, I see a couple of places (Yesasia and Eslite) still selling the unrestored full-frame edition that doesn't have English subtitles—I suppose that could still be in print, but I suspect it's just old stock, and it's not much use for most people here. (Anyone who doesn't need English subtitles would be better off with the Japanese Blu.) There was a standalone Taiwanese DVD release of the restored version, but I can't find it in stock anywhere and I would think it would've gone OOP when they did the dual-format reissue.

[WmS]

Thanks for the pun & name notes, Andy. On this:

Early accounts from people who attend the screening indicate that the restoration is still uneven, but the only problematic scene I can identify when viewing it on my setup is

Spoiler

the scene right after the climactic stabbing, when Si'r's family members rush to the police station, which lasts for about half a minute

, which has a dupey look and might be from elements generations away from the OCN.

That's the scene I described in my notes on Criterion's restoration demonstration at the Wexner Center. Short version is that shot was irreparably damaged, and what we see is an upscale to 4K from the prior restoration.

For what it's worth, I think the new restoration looks fantastic. I wish that shot had survived, but you can only do so much.

[cdnchris]

I was wondering about that. It was a fairly jarring moment because it looks nothing like the rest of the film, and the quality drop is severe with horizontal lines going across the image. It does look like an upscale.

[dwk]

Criterion posted an interview with one of the screenwriters: Talking with Screenwriter Hung Hung About A Brighter Summer Day

[Roscoe]

Got mine the other day, turned out the case was damaged -- any one else had that issue?

[nissling]

jsdvd.com still has copies of the Blu-Ray of The Terrorizers, last I checked.

I bought mine there some years ago. Pretty good Blu-Ray indeed. Not particularly sharp or vivid but certainly far superior to any other alternative, and clearly impressive to see a Yang film look that good considering how many Taiwanese films from that era has very limited distribution.

[htom]

I watched A Brighter Summer Day yesterday and can happily report that the release exceeds my expectation in almost every respect. Early accounts from people who attend the screening indicate that the restoration is still uneven, but the only problematic scene I can identify when viewing it on my setup is

Spoiler

the scene right after the climactic stabbing, when Si'r's family members rush to the police station, which lasts for about half a minute

, which has a dupey look and might be from elements generations away from the OCN. Overall, the color is good (no teal-push whatsoever), sound is clear and the four hours simply soar by.

There also seem to be two visible points where different elements may have been joined:

1) The pan shot that allows us to see the modesty of the Zhang's Japanese-style house begins looking at Xiao Si'r sitting half out of his bunk and comes to rest looking into the kitchen. In the few seconds before Xiao Si'r reenters the shot dressed in his school uniform the still image can be seen to jump slightly. I thought this meant the camera had been nudged slightly out of position in between filming since there is an obvious time jump in this interim, but examining the jump more closely the extreme right side of the image doesn't shift position, only the left. The same thing happens in the final long shot inside the film studio. My conclusion would be that different elements were used, and that the jump shows that the two elements do not match exactly in picture area (I guess one shows slightly more picture area than the other) and that this represented the degree of damage that had to be rectified. The fact that the color and grain density do not change noticeably during these transitions is a tribute of sorts to the job done.

2) Just seeing the light flare in the end credits sequence suggests how much could not be corrected with the tools available in 2009.

On another front, how such a staggering achievement could not even make the short list for the 1991 Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award is beyond me. Then again, looking at the list of submissions, I hadn't been previously aware that films by Kieslowski, Kurosawa, Pialat and Almodovar had also been passed over for the short list as well. The commentary by Tony Rayns suggests that Yang himself prevented Yi Yi from seeing a theatrical release in Taiwan, which I suppose is why it does not show up as even being submitted by any nation for that year of eligibility...

[zedz]

On another front, how such a staggering achievement could not even make the short list for the 1991 Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award is beyond me. Then again, looking at the list of submissions, I hadn't been previously aware that films by Kieslowski, Kurosawa, Pialat and Almodovar had also been passed over for the short list as well. The commentary by Tony Rayns suggests that Yang himself prevented Yi Yi from seeing a theatrical release in Taiwan, which I suppose is why it does not show up as even being submitted by any nation for that year of eligibility...

It's not really that surprising to me. Any similarity between the best foreign film Oscar nominees and the best non-English language film of any given year has only ever been slightly more than random. Especially complex and demanding films rule themselves out almost immediately, and a great number of filmmakers that are now (or even at the time) considered truly important are either not popular in their country of origin, or unknown / undistributed outside it, so the chances of being nominated by their own country or selected by the Academy are exceedingly slight. For the record, A Brighter Summer Day was Taiwan's nominee for the award in 1992, but who knows whether anybody even bothered to watch it?

[Trees]

Pacific Northwest folks....

• The Northwest Film Center will screen Edward Yang’s “A Brighter Summer Day,” featuring the film debut of Chinese star Chang Chen, about a 14-year-old torn between a life of juvenile deliquency and a more traditional path. The details: 3 p.m. Saturday, April 9, Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 S.W. Park Ave. ($9, $8 students/seniors, $6 children, http://www.nwfilm.org" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;).

[FrauBlucher]

bluray.com

[htom]

There also seem to be two visible points where different elements may have been joined:

Following up on this, I decided to take a look at the previously circulating (and generally lousy) video edition of this film, and checking the scenes in question they indeed appear without the slight change in image geometry we have in the current restoration. Hearing the difficulty in getting (further) access to the source materials it seems this will not change for a while.

In looking at the online reviews that are now popping up because of this release I'm seeing the opening images of a hand pulling a lamp chain to 'on' mentioned more than once. Am I wrong in thinking this is a somewhat misplaced interest? I assumed it was just the logo for the production company (Yang & His Gang), and this was the only film of theirs as well.

[knives]

Anything I say specific to the film will probably be trite especially since I got more out of little quirks like the unusually small member of the gang singing then the bigger tapestry which has a lot of well trodden territory. It is interesting to place this in an auteurist capacity as so much DNA in terms of story and storytelling is shared by Yi Yi and The Terrorizers. Yang seems to be building and improving on the bones of the previous film(s) in each case and it really makes me wish more was available to see if this continuity is a constant or just here in these youth crime obsessed films. The style is also interesting with Yang seemingly taking inspiration from the same Hollywood well as Ozu, but to completely different results. There's nothing especially experimental in these three, but at the same time there's something dramatically different about Yang's expression that makes me unable to fit him with anyone else before or since.

[zedz]

The style is also interesting with Yang seemingly taking inspiration from the same Hollywood well as Ozu, but to completely different results. There's nothing especially experimental in these three, but at the same time there's something dramatically different about Yang's expression that makes me unable to fit him with anyone else before or since.

I think that this is an interesting observation. From a purely visual standpoint, Yang is quite a classical director, and you can see the influence of Ozu and Antonioni throughout his work. Where I see him as being radically innovative is in his handling of narrative, on several levels:

Complexity: Several of his films (That Day, on the Beach, A Brighter Summer Day, A Confucian Confusion, Yi Yi) manage to cram the incident and cast of big old-fashioned novels into film form, without sacrificing character nuance or resorting to conventional exposition (nobody is ever introduced or given a backstory through dialogue). This is no mean feat, and Yang employed what, as far as I know, is a unique 'parallel-universe' screenwriting process in order to achieve those finished forms. (Writers would be asked to pursue to its logical conclusion every possible major character decision. I suppose its a bit like a chess grandmaster imagining every possible alternative game before they make their move.)

Causality: The chains (webs?) of causality in his films are impeccably worked out, thorough, and driven by the specific psychology of the characters. It takes the entire film to get Xiao S'ir into position for his climactic scene, but it's never an inexorable fate. It's the accumulation of dozens of small, ordinary, plausible decisions, not big, dramatic crises (or screenwriter fiat) that determine a person's fate.

Delivery: Yang's films are an aesthetic delight, but almost every component of style is carrying a narrative burden: nothing is just for show. This is clearest for me in his use of off-screen sound, which often serves the purpose of establishing shots that would otherwise slow things down. His use of locations is also meticulous in the way he relates shots so that we can get a coherent sense of space and a solid real-world understanding of how different screen spaces relate to one another (the best examples of this are probably the writer's apartment in The Terrorizer and the family's apartment in Yi Yi - and in both cases understanding the layout of those domestic spaces helps us to understand the narrative). I also doubt that any director has ever made greater narrative use of reflections. There have been a bunch of directors for whom reflections / shiny surfaces were a key factor in their visual aesthetic, but it's only really in Yang that what we see in a reflection can actually be delivering important plot information (or even overlapping two different narratives / spaces simultaneously).

This revolutionizing of film narrative is something common to the Taiwanese New Wave. Yang, Hou and Tsai all tell their stories in ways that eschew traditional film narrative conventions, without traditional exposition, but they all do so in very different ways.

For example, Hou strips out conventional exposition probably even more ruthlessly than Yang did, but he generally does so with much less complicated base narratives, which makes for a very different (and much calmer) filmgoing experience. Interestingly, in The Assassin, where he does have to deal with a number of complicated backstories, he does so by reinserting scenes of expository dialogue. Tsai's base narratives tend to be far less traditional / more experimental in the first place, so there's less distance between form and content than with Hou and Yang.

[knives]

I agree he's very classical, but (and I suppose this is what you were getting at)the way he applies that classical composition and editing onto the narrative feels unique to him. What you mention in delivery is most immediately what I mean where there's a recontextualization of classical technique as an interior expression with story subservient to character rather then vice versa. Antonioni and Hou, for example, seem to also have a goal of interior expression, but accomplish that with a radically changed aesthetic (going back to Mizoguchi I suppose). Figuring out how to make Ford style function like them is what makes Yang so different aesthetically to me and honestly I prefer so far his methodology.

[zedz]

I was home sick from work yesterday, so I decided to listen to Tony Rayns commentary, and it's a tremendous piece of work. Nearly four hours (he only shuts up for one crucial scene) of carefully constructed, superbly researched discussion and information, including excerpts from private letters written by Yang during the making of the film. It's full of crucial contextual information (e.g. quite a bit about class, and the important insight that when Ma intervenes in the gang's abduction of Xiao S'ir this isn't just about his father being an important man, but is quite specifically about military rank) and revealing formal insights (e.g. the way in which Yang consciously removes Xiao S'ir from the frame towards the end of the film).

Rayns has one significant quibble about the film, which I can sort of understand, but look at differently:

Spoiler

It's about Ming's 'unknowability' and her mysterious appeal to so many different male characters. Rayns seems to find this kind of imposed on the film rather than being totally organic, but I actually think it's both necessary and natural / logical.

It's necessary because Xiao S'ir is our focal character and the great tragedy of the film is that he never 'gets' Ming. I feel that her character needs to be opaque enough for that relationship dynamic to work. If we had much greater insight into her character, or she was more forthcoming, I suspect the film would fall down in other ways. Also, in her final scene, she actually does try to explain herself to a much greater extent, but it's too little, too late, and Xiao S'ir can't process it (just as he didn't really understand what Jade had told him a little earlier).

And the general fascination for Ming is natural / logical not because of some amazing feminine mystique, but because of her position as the girlfriend of absent gang leader Honey. Horrible as it might be, that relationship has conferred a local value on her, and it's the (only?) reason that Sly was after her. It's also the reason that Tiger is warned about her - in fact, is there any evidence that Tiger actually has a crush on her, or is it just a projection of the jealous gang members who see her as a valuable token? (And from the last we see of Ma, it seems likely that he 'adopts' Ming in a perverse attempt at forging a stronger bond with Xiao S'ir, which is the relationship he really values.) Everything is the tragic consequence of a society that sees women as accessories to men. Xiao S'ir is the only character who encounters Ming on neutral terms and forges a genuine relationship with her before becoming aware of her relational 'value'. (It's crucial to understand that, because of his eyesight problem, Xiao S'ir never has any idea who it is that flees from the schoolroom at the beginning of the film, even though everybody assumes it him who started any number of rumours about it.) This is why Honey trusts her with him, and it's why Ming is so devastated to discover that they don't actually have a genuine friendship but instead that it's just the same old competitive male bullshit.

The rest of the extras are somewhat uneven. The Chang Chen interview is fine, though not exactly in-depth. The Yang play is a wonderful thing to have, though it feels a lot more like part of one of the strands of A Confucian Confusion or Mahjong than anything to do with this film. From an auteurial perspective, it's somewhat slim pickings beyond the mood shifts and the narrative use of sound (the bare-set performance is enhanced by a very active foley track). The New Taiwan Cinema doc has lots of interesting information, but it's more than a bit of a shambles, having very little to say about the second decade it's ostensibly covering (so: almost no mention of A Brighter Summer Day, and Tsai Ming-liang comes off as little more than a footnote, even though he's an interview subject). It's probably most worthwhile for the glimpses it offers of great films you can't otherwise see (in muddy SD) as well as several unsuspected New Taiwanese Cinema films that look wholly unremarkable.