The Goddess (1934 film)


Goddess is a 1934 Chinese silent film released by the Lianhua Film Company. 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. Director Wu Yonggang was a leftist writer-director who struggled to make films in China from the 1930s up until the early 1980s, enduring the mass social changes that accompanied the Communist takeover and the Cultural Revolution. Lo Ming Yau produced the film and Hong Weilie was the cinematographer.
The public responded with enthusiasm upon its initial release, largely due to Ruan Lingyu's popularity in Shanghai in the early 1930s. After Stanley Kwan's revival of Ruan Lingyu's story through the biopic Center Stage starring Maggie Cheung as Ruan, widespread public interest in the Chinese classic cinema was reinvigorated. Four years after the original release of Goddess, Yonggang Wu remade the film as with changes made to the cast, the setting, and parts of the storyline.
Today, Goddess is one of the best-known films of China's cinematic golden age, and has been as one of China's top 100 films by the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2005. It has also been named by renowned Chinese director Chen Kaige as his favorite film of the 1930s.

Director

An unnamed single mother works as a prostitute to support herself and her baby son. One night, fleeing from a police night patrol, she runs in to the room of a thug who forces her to stay the night with him for him in exchange for hiding her from the police.
Later, however, he and two of his henchmen show up at her place and claims her as his private property. When the woman attempts to flee, the thug tracks her down and frightens her by claiming to have sold her son to punish her. The thug returns the child but she realizes that she has no choice but to submit to him. 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.
When the son becomes of age, she enrolls him in school. But soon after, the parents learn that the boy’s mother is a prostitute and they send reproachful letters to the school, complaining that they cannot allow their children to study together with a child from a disreputable background. 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 of why her son cannot receive what is best for him, due to her depraved background. Realizing his wrong, 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 laughs and informs her that he has already spent it. In a moment of anger, she kills the thug by smashing a bottle on his head.
In the end, the mother is convicted of the murder of the thug, Zhang, and sentenced to 12 years in jail. When the school principal reads of this news in a newspaper article, he visits her behind prison bars and promises her that he would adopt her son from the orphanage and raise him well, with good education like she wanted. 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, in that the Chinese term shennüserves 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 Goddess, Ruan appears in front of the camera wearing a cheongsam, which was a popular clothing worn by women in 1930s China. This reflects Shanghai’s weakened state, as the qipao represents the blend of Chinese culture and Western colonization. At the same time, the qipao reflects a patriarchal 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.

The Practice of Self-Censorship

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 is the atmosphere during the film’s production in October and November 1934, when there were strict conservative restrictions and state surveillance in place by China’s Kuomintang Nationalist Party. 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. 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

In the historical and political context that Wu Yanggong wrote the screenplay in, he possessed a highly nuanced social consciousness that he wanted to express through his film exploring the realities of prostitution. 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 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.
The film also reflects a strong sense of patriarchy in the way that Ruan’s character is rejected a happy end. The last scene where she sits alone behind prison bars symbolize the barriers that women face in society, their success extremely difficult or impossible.
The troubled life of a single mother becomes embedded in a larger social criticism of the working class, expressed by the juxtaposition of the images of workers heading to factories in the morning as the goddess heads back home, exhausted after a night’s work. This montage sequence in the film illustrates the demoralizing reality of the never ending labor of the professions which only profit the wealthy.

Hollywood Influence

Many early Shanghai-produced films were heavily influenced by Hollywood, a characteristic commonly seen in the filmography of the Lianhua Film Company. Goddess remains one of their most well-known films, and exhibits some of the camera techniques characteristic to Hollywood that can also be identified as part of the Lianhua Film style. Through the use of intertitles, lighting and distinctive close up shots of the protagonist’s face, Cinematographer Hong Weilie humanizes the Goddess, creating a strong emotional connection between her character and the audience.
More than just being influenced by cinematic techniques originating in Hollywood, Goddess also borrows generic conventions, particularly from the "fallen woman" films popularized in the 1920s and 30s like Stella Dallas,Stella Dallas, Madame X, The Sin of Madelon Claudet and Blonde Venus. Some similarities include the Goddess's fall from grace in society, although in contrast to many fallen women films this occurs before the start of the film, and her devotion to her child, willing to make great personal sacrifices to ensure a better life for him. However, while Goddess owes a narrative debt to these earlier Hollywood films, its quality has been enough to immortalize it as a worthy contemporary of them, particularly based on the strength of Ryan Lingyu's performance. In contemporary international film festivals, Ryan Lingyu has been featured alongside other prolific "fallen woman" actresses such as Marlene Dietrich and Barbara Stanwyck, and even nicknamed the "Garbo of the Orient", a reference to Greta Garbo.

Reception

Wu's directorial debut was received well back in 1934. Ruan Lingyu's popularity definitely played a factor but also the screenplay for Goddess tugged at emotional heartstrings for appeal. As mentioned previously, the Cultural Revolution impacted the acceptability of film content and styles. Interest and recognition in the “classic” film era for Chinese cinema returned internationally after Maggie Cheung's portrayal of Ruan Lingyu in the biopic Center Stage.

Production release

Release Date Country/Region
December 7, 1934 Shanghai, China
April 22, 2014 China
June 15, 2014 China
June 24, 2014 France
October 14, 2014 British

Other release versions