Restoration Spotlight: Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day
Posted August 8, 2016 05:07 PM by Webmaster
The Criterion Collection has released a new video that highlights some of the work that was done during the recent 4K restoration of Taiwanese director Edward Yang's masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day (1991), starring Chen Chang, Elaine Jin, Chin Tsai, and Lisa Yang.
Among the most praised and sought-after titles in all contemporary film, this singular masterpiece of Taiwanese cinema, directed by Edward Yang, finally comes to home video in the United States. Set in the early sixties in Taiwan, A Brighter Summer Day is based on the true story of a crime that rocked the nation. A film of both sprawling scope and tender intimacy, this novelistic, patiently observed epic centers on the gradual, inexorable fall of a young teenager (Chen Chang, in his first role) from innocence to juvenile delinquency, and is set against a simmering backdrop of restless youth, rock and roll, and political turmoil.
Restoration Credits:
This new 4K digital restoration, undertaken in partnership with The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project, was created from the 35mm original camera negative on an ARRISCAN film scanner with wet-gate processing. Thousands of instances of dirt, debris, scratches, splices, and warps were manually removed using MTI's DRS while Digital Vision's Phoenix was used for small dirt, grain, noise management, jitter, and flicker. The original monaural soundtrack was restored by Cineteca di Bologna from the original soundtrack negative. Additional restoration was performed by the Criterion Collection using Pro Tools HD and iZotope RX4.
Colorist: Lee Kline/Criterion, New York.
4K scanning: L'Imagine Ritrovata, Bologna.
Special Features:
New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
New audio commentary featuring critic Tony Rayns
New interview with actor Chen Chang
Our Time, Our Story, a 117-minute documentary from 2002 about the New Taiwan Cinema movement, featuring interviews with Yang and filmmakers Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, among others
Videotaped performance of director Edward Yang's 1992 play Likely Consequence
New English subtitle translation
PLUS: An essay by critic Godfrey Cheshire and a 1991 director's statement by Yang