48 Suzhou River

[swo17]

25 Mar UK

[ryannichols7]

absolutely thrilled Radiance beat the US rightsholder to getting this one out. Tony Rayns and In Shanghai are terrific extras - wonder how long Rayns' piece will end up being, as have been enjoying his loaded contributions for Indicator recently. still wild his Radiance debut was for a French film, something unusual for him.

as for the film in question here, it's terrific, and I hope to write something a bit more substantial about it upon revisit...but I do wanna pass the word along to anyone who gets motion sickness, the shaky handheld look of this film is tough if you're not prepared like I was. hoping to see more Lou Ye and mainland Chinese cinema in general - there is more beyond Taiwan and Hong Kong*!

(*-though I'd love to see Radiance get in the game and put out better editions of Tsai/Hou/Yang/etc in the UK if MOC isn't gonna be doing them)

[beamish14]

Glad I didn’t get Strand’s disc!

[feihong]

I did get the Strand disc, but I'll happily upgrade. This is still one of my favorite films, decades on. Far moreso for me than Vertigo, the obvious inspiration for a lot of the picture.

[What A Disgrace]

This has been delayed to the 29th of April. Consequently, the rest of my March order has shipped. I'm assuming that the disc will ship with the proper April pre-orders.

[ryannichols7]

I never circled back around but I didn't realize the Strand disc had even been out...shows how little fanfare it got in the US

it appears it's gonna ship with the April stuff. since I combined March and April orders that works for me

[AxeYou]

Very much appreciated the late Tony Rayns's contextualizing of Lou's early career as it was impacted by the post-1989 crackdown. I did think the first booklet essay by Josh Slater-Williams perhaps shoehorned way too many Hitchcock connections into the analysis, as Lou himself has said in a later piece in the booklet that he was not consciously evoking Hitchcock.

Below, a note on the audio restoration and the 5.1 remix from the booklet, which is also found on the restoration's press release (there's also an essay by Dennis Lim here!). Emphasis mine.

Would've been nice if Radiance included the OG mono mix too, but it sounds like the 5.1 is at least faithful to that. FWIW I watched the Radiance disc last night and it looks and sounds great.

Every restoration project is a prototype. There is no rule book, especially when working on films from other cultural backgrounds. I often compare restoration work to that of an archeologist – you find the broken pieces, stick them back together, and then, seeing the shape of it, you fill in the missing gaps. Restoring a film is trying to understand not only the cultural background but the time that it was produced in and the situation surrounding the production. It is quite intimate. You really have the director’s work under a microscope.

Working on SUZHOU RIVER was special, as I was able to communicate with Lou Ye and his assistant director Ying Li throughout the whole process. An opportunity like this sets a clear framework for the restoration. During these sessions, we generally discuss the director’s approach, things they would have liked to do at the time of production but were not allowed or technically able to achieve. In terms of sound, spreading the mono signal from the original material into a 5.1 experience - which we did on SUZHOU RIVER - is nearly a pioneer’s work. This calibre of sound restoration came up in the last ten years. In Germany, there might only be a dozen sound engineers working with that technique. Although Lou Ye was eager to create a 5.1 sound experience, he also insisted on keeping the roughness of the audio, and even some of the original sound mistakes for authenticity.

We made a point to not add any new sound or atmospheres to the film. Everything was extracted directly from the original material. It was a balance between repairing and reshaping.

Ying Li was here in the Berlin studio and in close contact with Lou Ye at all times. We would tweak the scenes and the sound together following the director’s feedback before sending a playout for him to screen in China. He would then send us his feedback with a list of timecodes and suggested treatments. At the end of the process, he confirmed the restoration’s sound stayed faithful to the original soundtrack.

Ansgar Frerich, rerecording mixer at Basis Berlin Postproduktion

Update:

The press release seems to somewhat contradict this statement. From the "Technical information" on page 22:

The soundtrack was restored at Basis Berlin Postproduktion gmbh. New foleys were recored by Fabian Weigmann and Jonathan Ritzel, the sound design was recreated and additional sound effect added by Sebastian Tesch. The dolby 5.1 mix was mastered by Ansgar Frerich and Sebastian Tesch.