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