The Arch (1968) and its director, Tang Shu Shuen (sometimes known as Cecile Tang Shu Shuen or T’ang Shushuen), are outliers. The film, about a Ming Dynasty widow torn between desire and duty, is considered the first Hong Kong art film, and a free-spirited precursor to the Hong Kong New Wave that followed in the 1980s and 1990s. It was independently produced outside of Hong Kong’s commercial film industry which, in the 1960s, was dominated by martial arts films coming out of Shaw Brothers and Cathay, the two major studios at the time. It was celebrated internationally – it premiered in San Francisco, then showed at the Cannes Film Festival, and at the Locarno Film Festival – but returned to Hong Kong to a tepid response by local critics, who, like their Western counterparts, dismissed the film along gendered lines. Tang, meanwhile, has the unusual distinction of being the rare woman director from Hong Kong, and for that matter the rare Chinese woman director. But she does not neatly fit a category. Tang was born in Hong Kong in 1941, but moved to Taiwan in her teens, and in her early twenties she attended film school at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles. After returning to Hong Kong to make The Arch andthe three features that followed, and found Close Up, a short-lived film journal, she again went back to Los Angeles to care for her ailing mother. She opened a Chinese restaurant in Beverly Hills and left filmmaking altogether.

The impulse to put Tang and The Arch into various taxonomic boxes – directed by a woman, Chinese art film, Hong Kong independent – has always attended discussions of the work itself. Film scholar Ching Yao observes that critics and film historians who either praise Tang as being ‘ahead of her time’, or denigrate her achievements as a female or Chinese director (or both) ‘[perpetuate] the marginalisation of women directors… [who then become] a category for curious historical and cultural artifacts.’Ching Yao, Filming Margins: Tang Shu Shuen, a Forgotten Hong Kong Woman Director (Hong Kong University Press, 2004), p17. For Vincent Canby, writing in the New York Times, Tang is unsubtle and lacks ‘the courage to be modest’: she is the wrong kind of Chinese woman.Vincent Canby, “Stylized China”, The New York Times, April 6, 1972, p53. Cited in Yao, p8.

Such qualities describe the women in The Arch, too. Madame Tung (Lisa Lu), who lives with her daughter and mother-in-law in a remote village in feudal China, is awaiting news of whether she will receive a chastity arch, a large gate bestowed by the emperor in recognition of moral uprightness. The order of the women’s home is disrupted when a handsome cavalry captain (Roy Chiao) takes quarter with them while his troops patrol the mountainside for bandits. Madame Tung is immediately drawn to Yang Kwan; so is the marriageable Wei Ling, played by pop idol Hilda Chow Hsuan. Wei Ling’s grandmother, meanwhile, serves as a living reminder of the sacrifices widows are expected to make in this strictly patriarchal society, where remarriage is forbidden. Where Wei Ling leads with coquettish flirtation, her mother lowers her gaze. The captain, meanwhile, boldly pronounces his feelings in a poem he leaves for Madame Tung to find. “Helplessly he admires her majestic grace and admires her constant dignity.” We hear his voice as she pours over the page. “But alas, cold are the vaults of her memory, unable to feel the flame of his feeling…” These latter lines later become the widow’s sad refrain. Yang Kwan misunderstands her; she certainly feels his affections, but she cannot return them. The long-awaited notice from the emperor arrives: the arch will be built, and Madame Tung’s fate sealed. The captain turns to Wei Ling, who beckons him to the forest. Rumours begin to fly, and Madame Tung confronts her daughter, who admits to their romance. Madame Tung does what she must do: marry her daughter to the captain.

From here, Madame Tung’s world begins to collapse. “Cold are the vaults of her memory” the captain’s words echo, now in her own voice, as she stands impassively at the wedding. As the ceremony progresses, the camera slowly zooms in on her. The image begins to go out of focus and the music fades, as though we were following Madame Tung into her thoughts. The film cuts away to an empty room with an altar full of offerings: might she be imagining her own wedding? The image is fleeting, and in the next she is back among the crowd, where no one registers the flicker of pain in her eyes. The dramatic alternation between the voices and sensations that signal Madame Tung’s inward state, and the wider shots that place her in the background among the wedding guests, makes this one of the more spectacular scenes in the film.

Her home empties: the young couple departs, her mother-in-law dies, and a weasel has crept into the henhouse. When Old Chang, their manservant, asks hopefully whether the black hen was spared, Madame Tung does not respond. She continues to carry out her daily routine as though she feels nothing, though she undoubtedly does. She teaches her young students, works at the loom, and listlessly pokes at her embroidery. Then one night, suddenly, she rushes out, grabs the black hen, and slits its throat. Its blood drips down her dress. Not long afterwards, the arch is finally erected. At the dedication ceremony, Madame Tung greets the villagers, who gaze on her admiringly, with a subdued expression. From their perspective, she is the ideal Chinese woman, a woman to be celebrated. From ours, she is one to be pitied.

The story of The Arch comes from a traditional Chinese folktale, though Tang’s version is based on a 1967 retelling, in English, by Lin Yutang. In his preface to the story, Lin provides the outline of the original, where a widow, set to receive a chastity arch, loses the opportunity when she gives way to temptation with her servant, and commits suicide. ‘The chicken story is in the original,’ he notes. For his version, called ‘Chastity’, he adds the characters of the daughter, the mother-in-law, and the captain. The widow, however, harbours no feeling for the captain. In the end, she marries the manservant and gives up the arch. The villagers are confused. “You can never tell about a woman,” they say.

Tang’s changes expand the inner life of Madame Tung. Her desire becomes more explicit: not to others, but to herself and to the audience. Tang exploits the gulf between what Madame Tung knows and what others don’t. It is the cost of her piety, and the size and shape of her invisible prison. The story of the black hen is especially telling, as the only other constant in all three versions of the tale, to which Tang adds a seemingly throwaway detail. When the hen is menaced by the weasel, Old Chang frets because “she has just started to lay eggs again”. The newly fertile hen is made to resemble Madame Tung, who has, much to her dismay, become sexually awakened once more. And this information provides motive when the widow later kills the creature. The scene is shocking, and not only because of the sudden violence. Staccato editing builds to a horrific image of her bloodied hands, and extraordinary superimpositions overlay the moment with Madame Tung’s memories of an accidental touch with the captain, the carving of the chastity arch, and her own placid expression, which we now understand to conceal so much. Her violent act becomes one of jealousy over those that might more freely explore their desire, and one of projective self-harm: the hen is a figure to kill when she can’t kill herself.

The places where Madame Tung feels restraint become the site of Tang’s most expressive formal choices. Lu’s performance is a careful calibration of averted eyes, sometimes fixed in a middle distance, and a deliberately slow and even gait, all while suggesting an ocean of feeling within. Madame Tung has no one to confide in and, unlike her daughter, who enjoys the freedom of the mountains, she stays within the confines of her home. What amplifies her inner turmoil are the stylistic choices Tang makes to tell this story: the score’s plaintive pipa, an ancient Chinese flute, that seems tuned to the widow’s heart; the dizzying camerawork of Subrata Mitra, recognisable from his photography on the films of Satyajit Ray; and the freewheeling editing of Tang’s USC classmate Les Blank. The effect is altogether modern, cosmopolitan, even experimental, all qualities that reflect Tang’s unique position between Hong Kong and the United States, the international cast and crew she assembled, and the headiness of the moment – consider, for instance, how the film’s 1968 premiere at the San Francisco Film Festival occurred alongside the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.See Inney Prakash, “Interview: T’ang Shushuen on The Arch,”Film Comment, October 6, 2025. This may be why Canby and others like him so profoundly misunderstood The Arch in its time. Though the film presents as a historical melodrama, its central interest is the turmoil within Madame Tung’s heart, a rebellion which it pits against cinematic norms of 1960s Hong Kong cinema, or whatever was then deemed proper to women’s and Chinese cinema. If The Arch was ahead of its time, it was because it recognised and rejected the boxes in which it would inevitably be placed. And though such containerisation has prevailed – as can be seen in the enduring categories of national, cultural, and identity-based cinemas – the film reminds us that the iconoclastic fire still burns, deep within.