Tuesday, February 13, 2024 at 7:30pm
Tang Shu Shuen's The Arch
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
The Arch (董夫人), Tang Shu Shuen, 1969, digital projection, 96 mins
One of the earliest Sinophone films to crossover into Western arthouses, Tang Shu Shuen’s The Arch was celebrated following its European premiere at Cannes. The first dispatches from France compared it to Chekhov, Mizoguchi, and La Princesse de Clèves, and an older guard of auteurs, like Fritz Lang and Josef von Sternberg, shared their enthusiasm. Tang’s debut is an exquisite psychological romance, set during the Ming dynasty in the 17th century. It centers on a thirty-four-year-old widow, Madam Tung, who is venerated by fellow villagers for her virtue and chastity, but must battle her own desires as she falls in love with a handsome young soldier. “In this particular era of explicit and vulgarized sensuality this treatment of contained passion is more powerful, reaching an intensity quite rare in films,” remarked Anaïs Nin. “I admire a woman so young to have completed such a refined and enduring classic.”
Tang wrote, produced, and directed The Arch when she was still in her twenties; it was shot in Hong Kong and Taiwan by Subrata Mitra, cinematographer for the Apu Trilogy and numerous other films by Satyajit Ray, and edited in America by Les Blank. An idiosyncratic outlier in its own time, The Arch was later viewed as a forerunner to the Hong Kong New Wave, though it’s since become somewhat neglected stateside. “I see in Madame Tung the helplessness of all of us,” Tang wrote. “She exemplifies the ludicrousness of mankind, the futility of morality, the futility of intelligence, the futility of knowledge and of ethics—the fact that we cannot escape anguish and torment.”
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.