The Goddess (神女 Shennü)

Click here for a text of the intertitles, translated by Yomi Braester.

Director: Wu Yonggang

Screenplay: Wu Yonggang

Cinematographer: Hong Weilie

Producer: Luo Mingyou

Cast: Ruan Lingyu, Li Keng, Zhang Zhizhi

Studio: Lianhua (United Photoplay Service) Company, 1934

Description: b/w, silent, about 79 minutes. DVD released by San Francisco Silent Film Festival in July 2004.

A note on the title:

The Chinese title Shennü has a double meaning: literally, it means "divine woman," but colloquially it can be an euphemism for streetwalking prostitutes.

The film starts with an elliptical epigraph: "The Goddess...struggling in life's turmoil...on the night streets, she is a lowly prostitute... When she picks up her child in her arms, she is a holy mother... In the midst of her two lives, she shows her great humanity."

Synopsis:

The anonymous heroine is a single mother who relies on streetwalking to raise her son in Shanghai. One night, trying to flee from the police, she encounters a hoodlum who then blackmails her into a mock marriage and grabs her money for gambling. She secretly moves away, but fails to find another job or to escape from the hoodlum's control. By selling her body and hiding some money from the hoodlum, she manages to save up money for her son's schooling and finds consolation in her son's good performance. However, the suspicious neighborhood and the school board discover her true occupation and have the boy expelled, despite the pleading of the symphathetic headmaster. Learning about her son's expulsion, the woman tries to escape to a place where no one would know them. But she only finds out that the hoodlum steals all her secretly-saved money. In a rage, she inadvertently kills him after a brief struggle. She is put on trial and receives a sentence of twelve years. The headmaster reads of her case in the newspaper. He visits her in prison and promises her that he will adopt and educate the child. Envisioning her son having a better future, she solicits the headmaster to tell the boy that his mother is dead.

About the director:

Wu Yonggang (1907-1982), was born into an intellectual family in Shanghai. Against his father's will, he became a trainee in the Baihe (Lily) Film Company after being expelled from middle school for participation in a student movement. In 1928, he became a set designer in the Tianyi Film Company while studying art in the Shanghai Art Academy. In 1931, he joined the Lianhua (United Photoplay Service) Company and participated in the production of Sange modeng müxing (Three Modern Girls) and Muxing zhi guang (Maternal Radiance). In 1934, touched by the plight of the streetwalkers he saw every night on his way from the studio to his home, Wu wrote and directed his first feature The Goddess. The artistic sophistication and serious social criticism of the film immediately earned him critical acclaim and it was later considered one of the "major examples of the worldwide art of silent cinema."

Wu wrote and directed about thirty films in his life. His other diretorial works include Langtaosha (1936), Zhuangzhi lingyun (1936), Qiuweng yu xian ji (1956), Lin Chong (1958), Bashan yeyu (1980, co-direct with Wu Yigong; won the Best Feature Film of the first Golden Rooster Award in 1981), and Chutian fengyun (1981).

About the star:

Ruan Lingyu(1910-1935) was one of the greatest actress in Chinese silent cinema. Born into a poor Cantonese family in Shanghai, she had a tough childhood and became the common-law wife of a wastrel at age 16. She started her acting career at the Mingxing (Star) Studio to support her family in 1926, however, her talent was not fully displayed until she joined the newly established Lianhua Studio in 1930. With Gudu chunmeng (Spring Dream in the Old Capital, dir. Sun Yu, 1930), her first major work, Ruan started her collaboration with a group of talented left-leaning directors. She starred in a series of social dramas featuring suffering women from various social strata, including Sange modeng müxing (Three Modern Girls, dir. Bu Wangcang, 1932), Xiao wanyi (Little Toys, dir. Sun Yu, 1933), Shennü (The Goddess, dir. Wu Yonggang, 1934), and Xin nüxing (New Woman, dir. Cai Chusheng, 1934). Her powerful and subtle performing style is often compared to Greta Garbo and Lilian Gish in the West.

Ruan's fame brought her troubled personal life to merciless public scrutiny. Shortly after the public screening of her last film New Woman, there arose vindictive attacks from street tabloids for the scathing depiction of them in the film; in response, Ruan committed suicide on the eve of International Women's Day (March 8), 1934, at age 25.

Ruan Lingyu became the subject and the feature title of Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan's (Guan Jinpeng) 1992 film, which is translated into English as Center Stage or The Actress, starring Maggie Cheung (Zhang Manyu).

Click here for an comprehensive website dedicated to Ruan Lingyu.

Questions to ponder:

These are a few questions suggested for you to think about while reading the assigned articles and watching the film. Please jot down ideas and notes on details or scenes you think are relevant for class discussion.

1. As the title and the epigraph suggest, the goddess lives a double life. How do you understand her "double life" in the social and economic contexts of 1930's Shanghai?

2. How does the film represent the doubleness of the goddess? Can you explain it in filmic language (i.e. mise en scene, shot, editing, etc.)?

3. How do you read the related image of woman and modern city?

4. One film critic talks about this film in terms of the Western melodramatic tradition of "fallen woman" films. In what ways is this film "melodramatic?"

5. Some critics talks about female subjectity in this film. Can you sense the subjectivity of the goddess? Or is she objectified by the male discourse of female virtue?

6. How do you understand the mother/son relationship in the film?

7. How do you understand the role of the headmaster?

8. How do you understand the ending of the film? Critics say it is not a happy ending. Why is that so? Does the film point out any solution to social injustice, or leave it ambiguous?

Relevant readings:

Clark, Paul. 1987a. Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949. Cambridge UP. 4-21.

Cui, Shuqin. 2003. Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 3-29.

Grasso, June, et al. Modernization and Revolution in China. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1991. 70-120.

Meyer, Richard. Ruan Ling-yu: The Goddess of Shanghai. HK: HK University Press, 2005.

Rothman, William 1993. "The Goddess: Reflections on Melodrama East and West." In Wimal Dissanayake Melodrama and Asian Cinema. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 59-72.

Web Sources: Ling Lung Women's Magazine (1931-1937); An Illustrated History of the Communist Party of China; Tales of Old Shanghai.