1934 Chinese silent film directed by Wu Yonggang
The Goddess () is a 1934 Chinese silent film released by the Lianhua Film Company (United Photoplay). The film tells the story of an unnamed woman, who lives as a streetwalker by night and devoted mother by day in order to get her young son an education amid social injustice in the streets of Shanghai, China. It stars Ruan Lingyu in one of her final roles, and was directed by Wu Yonggang. Lo Ming Yau produced the film and Hong Weilie was the cinematographer.
The public responded with enthusiasm, largely due to Ruan Lingyu's popularity in Shanghai in the early 1930s. Four years after the original release of "Goddess", Yonggang Wu remade the film as "Yanzhi Lei)" with changes made to the cast, the setting, and parts of the storyline. After Stanley Kwan's revival of Ruan Lingyu's story through the biopic "Center Stage" (1991) starring Maggie Cheung as Ruan, widespread public interest in the Chinese classic cinema was reinvigorated .
Today, "Goddess" is one of the best-known films of China's cinematic golden age, and has been named as one of China's top 100 films by the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2005.
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Plot.
An unnamed single mother (Ruan Lingyu) works as a prostitute to support herself and her baby son in 1930s Shanghai. One night, fleeing from a police sweep, she runs into the room of a thug called, "the Boss", (Zhang Zhizhi) who then forces her to have sex with him in exchange for hiding her from the police.
She agrees and later, the Boss, with two of his henchmen, tracks her down and shows up at her place and claims her as his own private property. From then on, he steals all her earnings to finance his gambling habit. The mother attempts to flee, to avoid him and find a respectable job, by moving to a new apartment. However, after pawning her jewelry to buy a toy for her son, she returns home to find out that the Boss tracked her down again. He threatens her, frightening her by claiming to have sold her son and the mother decides to submit to him again to retrieve her son. While living with the thug, she secretly stashes her nights’ earnings behind a hole in the wall, in order to provide her son with an education.
After years, she enrolls her son in a private school. But soon after, other kids at school begin to bully him and call him a "bastard" and the parents also learn that the boy's mother is a prostitute, which leads them to send reproachful letters to the school, demanding the school to expel the boy, complaining that they cannot allow their children to study together with a child from mother with a disreputable profession. Without a choice, the principal pays a visit to the goddess’ home to investigate the accusations of her profession, but the rumors prove to be true. As he sets his mind on expelling the boy, he is swayed by the mother's genuine love for her son and her heartfelt cries, questioning why her son cannot receive what is best for him. Realizing his mistake, the principal goes back to the school to convince other members of the school committee but they do not listen to him. Upon his failure, the principal resigns from his position and the boy's expulsion goes through.
Subsequently, the mother plans to move to a new place with her son where nobody will recognize who they are. When she tries to take out her savings from the hole in the wall, she realizes that the thug has stolen the money to support his gambling habits. When she asks him to return her money, he mocks her and informs that he has already spent it. In a moment of anger, she inadvertently kills the thug by smashing a bottle on his head.
In the end, the mother is convicted of the murder of the thug, the Boss, and sentenced to 12 years in jail. When the school principal reads of this news in a newspaper, he visits her behind prison bars and promises her that he would adopt her son from the orphanage and raise him well, providing a good education. Worried for her son's future and not wanting him to be burdened with his mother's dark history, she asks the principal to tell her son that his mother is dead. After the principal leaves, the young mother smiles as she envisions a bright future for her son, but her smile quickly fades away as she comes back to the cold reality of her life in the prison cell.
Title.
The film's title contains several layers of meaning. The word "goddess" is meaningful in that it represents the dual identities of the main character. During the day, the word refers the character as a divine "goddess," a loving mother and guardian for her son, while at night, it refers to her occupation; the Chinese term "shennü" also serves as an old euphemism for prostitute. At the time of the film's release, this euphemism was particularly relevant as Shanghai was believed to be home to 100,000 women working as prostitutes. Wu's use of the euphemism portrays his views of seeing beyond the stereotype of the fallen women and calls attention to the themes of class struggle and social inequality through the complex character of Ruan Lingyu, who is both victimized and empowered at times. Although she faces the prejudice of the society, she continuously fights against social pressure and attempts to seek justice in the system.
The Goddess in Historical Shanghai.
In "The Goddess", Ruan appears in front of the camera wearing a cheongsam (also called a qipao), a popular style worn by women since the 1920s China. By the 1930s, qipao became the exemplary dress for modern women in urban Shanghai. Well-to-do women, courtesans, dance hostesses, actresses, girl students, and female workers almost all accepted the characteristic style of qipao.
They dressed in qipao along with short bob or permed hair, stockings, high heels, and makeup not so different as seen on the Western flappers. In this sense, Qipao represents the blend of Chinese culture and Western colonization and reflects Shanghai's weakened state. Qipao are also published in pictorial magazines, fashion designs enriched clothing styles. The fetish for appearance and fashion occurred in the cinema together with the female-featured advertisement calendar posters (yuefenpai 月份牌).
As early examples of Chinese commercial advertising, calendar posters exclusively portray women, many wearing Qipao, as the conveyor of modern marketing messages. They include pictures of women seated with crossed legs, a specific bodily posture that, both in China and in the West, can be read both as a signifier of modernity and as a possible reminder of sexual availability. Calendar posters contributed to create a hybrid format of gender representation where women are portrayed simultaneously as both subject and object of market and sexual consumption, and more precisely where "the boundaries of subject and object, active and passive, owner and owned, unique and general, break down in an endless reflexive interplay of consumer and consumed.
Qipao, as a style of the commodified women on the calendar posters reflects a society which objectified female bodies as a source of pleasure and turned them into tradable commodities which led to the rise of prostitution in Shanghai. Based on the data collected from the sociologist Gamble: In 1917, Shanghai had the highest population of prostitutes compared to other cities, such as London, Berlin and Beijing. Records show that in 1935, there was 1 woman out of 9 - 15 female adults who resorted to prostitution in order to make a living. These numbers are the reason why Wu chose Shanghai as the Goddess’ background, to depict Shanghai's submission to foreign forces and the fallen women of Shanghai. On the other hand, prostitutes, as the visual harbinger of Chinese modernity became the negative side of this metropolitan city, as their roles took on meanings of the "victimized" and the "disorderly."
In this film, Ruan played a prostitute, standing on the night street with her long qipao. However, she was not fashioned as sexy in the traditional sense. While the film tells a story about a prostitute, it did not focus on the "erotic implications" of prostitution, not to mention the connection with moral decline. Instead, it focuses on the suffering of Ruan's character from the prejudice of the education system, the humiliation from neighbours and the abuses of the thug. The temporary status of prostitute and implication of qipao together depict the suffering of these fallen women as characterized by Ruan's character.
The Practice of Self-Censorship.
During the time period revolving around the goddess, a large fraction of Shanghai's female population had been designated as prostitutes—one-thirteenth of the female population. Having spent his time observing these "street walkers" and the fact that much of Wu Yonggang's early experience in cinema education revolved around the fallen women genre. Wu Yonggang had initially wished to write a screenplay to draw sympathy for them.
Despite Wu's wishes to show more of the realities of the women in Shanghai, he was forced to undergo self-censorship in order to navigate the diffuse and pervasive anxieties about ideology, politics and market confronting China's filmmakers in 1934. This is shown by Wu Yonggang response to contemporary critics, "‘When I first set out to write about the goddesses, I wished to show more of their real lives, but circumstances would not permit me to do so."
The circumstances that he refers to were the strict conservative restrictions and state surveillance in place by China's Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalist Party during the film's production in October and November 1934. When the KMT came to power, they set up the "Film Censorship Law" in 1930, and the Film Censorship committee (FCC) in 1931.
In the 1930s New Life Movement, film makers were encouraged to promote Confucian values, along with ideals of self-sacrifice and discipline in everyday life. Films would have to present their scripts to the FCC to ensure the upholding of New Life Movement values. The New Life Movement also emphasized the censoring of illicit scenes. The female lead of Goddess is a prostitute, but there are never any illicit scenes, and are implied instead (the Goddess’ child). Despite the lack of evidence which pointed to any formal orders requesting changes to "Goddess", Wu may still have felt the governmental pressure, as reported by Lianhua's weekly newsletter that New Life organizational committee members, as well as high-ranking government ministers like Chen Gongbo, had paid several visits to the set half-way through the shooting of the "Goddess".
The Confucian Convention: Motherhood in a Patriarchal Society.
This film contains several themes alluding to certain ideas that had been present in China. In a short essay published before the film's release in 1934, Wu writes,"When starting to write the script, I wanted to focus more on ['the prostitutes’] actual life experiences. But my circumstances made this impossible. To hide this weakness, I shifted to maternal love while consigning prostitution to the background by depicting an illegal prostitute struggling between two lives for the sake of her child. I used an exploitative thug to propel the plot. I also put words of justice into the mouth of an upright school headmaster, letting him expose the social cause of prostitution. I did not offer a solution to the problem."He intentionally used motherhood as an entry point for a more gritty examination of the conditions for prostitutes in Shanghai in the 1930s.
While this film is reminiscent of the genre conventions seen in the movies containing "fallen woman" figure, it also draws on the questions of motherhood at the front and centre. The film starts with an Art Deco image in the back, with the title superimposed on this image. This image portrays a naked woman with her hands tied behind her back, leaning forward over the naked infant. This portrayal of a woman leaning over the child seems to recall the theme of motherhood to the viewers’ minds. This image reappears as the background for later intertitles, signifying the importance of the motherhood as a theme in this film. "Maternal melodramas", in which mothers sacrifice themselves for their children was a Hollywood staple since the 1920s and China had a similar motivation for this theme; Confucian convention taught women to be