The Goddess

The Goddess is a 1934 Chinese silent film written and directed by Wu Yonggang and produced by the Lianhua Film Company, starring Ruan Lingyu. It was Wu's first film as director. An unnamed woman raises her young son by day and works as a prostitute at night; her earnings are taken by a gangster who attaches himself to her. She hides savings in a gap in a brick wall to pay for the boy's schooling, loses them when the hiding place is discovered, and is imprisoned after attacking the man. The camera is generally placed level with its subject, the gangster is not staged for moral condemnation, and the film uses fewer intertitles than was usual at the time. Ruan Lingyu died the year after its release, aged twenty-four. Surviving prints have been restored and screened publicly on a number of occasions, and the film is commonly listed among the principal works of Chinese silent cinema.

By day a mother, by night a streetwalker. Wu Yonggang wrote the script at twenty-seven and was directing for the first time, and his handling of the material was uncommon for 1934: no indictment, no pity, the camera set level with its subject. Even the gangster who extorts her is filmed as part of the environment rather than staged as someone to hiss at. Ruan Lingyu works almost without intertitles. She pushes her saved banknotes one at a time into a gap in the brickwork, and that one gesture does the work without a title card. Chinese silent film probably reached its ceiling here. Ruan killed herself the following year, at twenty-four. What holds up on a return visit is the film's posture toward its heroine, which is simply to film her as a person. Around 1934 I cannot think of much else anywhere that was willing to do the same for a woman in her position.

Mainland China

神女

Hong Kong

神女

Taiwan

神女

English

The Goddess

Original

神女

• Ruan Lingyuas The Mother
• Zhang Zhizhias The Boss