110. T'ang Shushuen: The Arch (featuring Lisa Dombrowski)

We are very excited to welcome Prof. Lisa Dombrowski to our podcast! She is a Professor of Film Studies and East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. She’s the author of the books: The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, I’ll Kill You! (2008), the editor of Kazan Revisited (2011), and co-editor of ReFocus: The Later Works and Legacy of Robert Altman (2022). (Ben worked on that last one!) 

We took Lisa’s fantastic film classes and she’s a big reason this podcast exists, and why we talk about movies the way we do. (You can read more about the podcast’s origin story on Patreon!)

Together, we preview a newly restored film showing at the upcoming New York Film Festival and M+ Restored programmes, T’ang Shushuen’s The Arch, which Lisa teaches in her classes. Lisa shares with us the film’s unconventional transnational production context, and we have an in-depth discussion about the film’s groundbreaking use of film form to portray female subjectivity. Eli highlights the film’s use of deep staging, Wilson compares the film with Ann Hui’s A Simple Life (2011), and Ben explains what he means by an “oyako-don” pantheon.

Links:

Read more about and get tickets for the M+ Restored programme

Screening in NYC for NYFF at Film at Lincoln Center

Obey your ancestors at our FREE patreon, discord server, and our socials @ www.deepcutpod.com 

Timestamps:

00:01:36 Introducing Prof. Lisa Dombrowski

00:06:48 M+ Restored

00:09:39 Context on director Tang Shu-shuen and The Arch

00:11:16 Lisa's relationship with The Arch

00:17:16 General reactions

00:23:30 Adaptation and subjectivity

00:26:06 Subtitles

00:28:06 Female gaze and melodramatic situation

00:30:28 The opening setup

00:33:28 Cinematography context

00:40:28 Love triangle and deep staging

00:43:34 Plum scene

00:52:37 Source material

00:55:28 Cultural context and societal norms

01:00:04 River scene and Mid-Autumn Festival

01:03:39 A Simple Life (2011) sidebar, subjective realism

01:07:25 Confucianism and social conditioning

01:10:29 Loom scene

01:13:04 Editing for meaning

01:16:32 The arch, the ending, the takeaway

01:24:57 Fractured images and liminal spaces

01:30:15 Lisa Lu and casting

01:31:32 The film's reception

01:33:56 Tang's approach

01:39:03 Cultural identity, transnational cinema, aesthetic expectations

01:43:32 Tang's career post The Arch

01:46:05 Outro