The Goddess 神女 (1934) is a silent black-and-white motion picture about the double life of a woman: street walker by night and loving mother by day. Almost everything I have read about it focuses on the moving performance of Ruan Lingyu 阮玲玉 (1910–1935) in the main role, the terrible demands of celebrity and her suicide at age 24, as well as that image of the “fallen” woman opposed to maternal virtue, analysed against the backdrop of the Nationalist’s New Life Movement 新生活運動 that was just beginning the year the film was released. Mostly, the focus is on the actress. There are many questions still to be dwelt on at greater length about The Goddess––its violence (she kills her pimp at the end by hitting him over the head with a beer bottle, overwhelmed, finally, by the emotional and physical pain he visits upon her), the film’s re-presentation in contemporary tabloids and magazines (the frames of the film that enter the eye of the print consumer), the gendering of the city of Shanghai, where the story takes place (in one shot she appears as a spectral figure floating above the city), the fashion and design of the film (the qipao dresses on hangers in her home, and the stylishness of the film itself), the subtitles structuring the temporality of the movie, Ruan Lingyu’s beauty. And more.
Here I want to focus on only two images that the director Wu Yonggang returns to in the movie five or more times, while I think out loud about how they gesture to the made-up-ness and materiality of the film. That is, I want to think about how these images tell us something about motion pictures as a form of visuality in Shanghai.
The first is a picture of the flickering neon city skyline at night. The buildings are so dark against the black night that they are defined in shape and height only by the white lights decorating them. The conical tower of the Hsin Hsin Department Store 新新百貨 with its neon arches and sign looms to the left; further back there is the shorter finial of the Sincere Department Store 先施百貨 and below, the Heavenly Charms Theatre 天韵樓. This is white on black, a light that is flashing, wavering, agitated.
The second film image is of a relief sculpture on a roughly chiseled wall. The subject is a woman kneeling protectively over a child––protective, although immobilized, her wrists bound with rope behind her back. The lines of the bodies are smooth and clean, soft and rounded, almost stylized, almost art nouveau. The fleshiness of the figures is emphasized by the soft gray tones of the picture. Unlike the flashing white on black of the city, here the grayscale colours are muted and quiet.
The subject of maternal suffering recalls etchings by the great German artist Käthe Kollwitz, which had already become popular among socialist-leaning print artists in Shanghai. Kollwitz’s print Woman with Dead Child (1903) conveys that same desperate desire to protect, and the same failure to do so. The artist’s pain travels through the strokes of the stylus, the depth of the cut line, into the paper. So, it makes sense that later the subject of the print was transformed into a three-dimensional bronze sculpture (1937–1938), and even later than that, a relief sculpture (1941), though much less contained than the one in the movie. Despite the differences in look, they prompt us to think about the immediacy of the movie’s relief sculpture, the purity of line against the roughness of the wall, and through that suggested tactility of the hand on stone, in this particular case, the hand of violence or care to which the sculpted figures respond mutely.
To juxtapose these two images, then: a dream city exists only through its light, and the smooth sculptural bodies beg for touch. One is black-and-white, the other gray. One is abstract, the other heavy stone. One is about modern technology, the other about the labour of the sculpting hand. That they are so opposing yet are found in the same film begs the question: where do these pictures appear in The Goddess?
The image of the night skyline first appears after Ruan’s character steps into a rickshaw to leave her shikumen home for a busier, commercial street, where she can pick up tricks. It next appears when she holds her infant at home, rocking him in her arms and looking dreamily upwards. It is transformed on its third appearance, when her pimp breaks away from gambling one night, looks out a window, and sees her image in the starless sky above the same city skyline. The fourth time it appears during a dinner with her son (now much older). The child reports that his schoolmates are bullying him. She again tilts her head back and envisions the city. Finally, after her son has been expelled from school (the rumour that she earns money through illegal prostitution has been confirmed by the school’s principal, so the school board takes action), they together look out of a window towards the neon city.
The second image, the image of the sculpture, appears behind the opening credits, then behind subtitles throughout the film that encapsulate the main turning points of the story: “On the nighttime streets, she is a cheap prostitute. When she holds her child in her arms, she is a divine and pure mother. In both lives she shows great moral character…;” “From then on, the Boss treated her as his private property;” “She had no choice but to return to the Boss’s clutches. The child grows day by day, and with him the mother’s worries;” “People calling her son a bastard cuts her to the core, and strengthens her resolve to see that he gets an education;” “The beginning of this new life fills her with excitement;” “The old principal receives many reproachful letters from parents concerned that this child of disreputable background is a blight upon the community;” “The old principal courageously offers his resignation, and the school immediately posts a notice of the child’s expulsion,” and, at the end; “Amid the silence of prison life, her only solace is the fond hope of a bright future for her child.”
In sum, the first image appears when people are daydreaming, imagining a space beyond their own lives, sometimes an erotic space, or a space of hope, a space that is and is not illusory. To be sure, it provides a sense of the placeness of the movie, demonstrated in its first appearance as Ruan’s character sets out to earn money through sex work on the city streets. But then again, Shanghai is, after all, the city of dreams. The second image appears behind language about plot, action, reaction, the struggles of everyday life. It marks the inexorable march towards the end of Ruan’s relationship with her son.
What we find in these two images, then, is more than symbolic value. It is a representation of how film works: the imagination of film captured in the night skies and a gesture towards film as a medium, just as stone is a medium, and a structuring medium at that (what comes first, what comes second). There’s an almost embarrassingly simple point to make: the visuality of the movie rests between the mind’s eye and the sensibility of the body, what we see and what we’re looking at. The Goddess’s enormous success must be put down in part to the fact that the movie reveals to us, in a direct yet brilliant way, how movies work.
To watch the movie on YouTube with Christopher Rea’s lucid and impeccable English translation of the subtitles quoted in this post, please visit: The Goddess (75 min.)
Kollwitz images:
Käthe Kollwitz, Woman with Dead Child. 1903. Line etching, drypoint, sandpaper, and soft ground; 42.4 x 48.6 cm.
After Käthe Kollwitz, Den Opfern von Krieg und Gewaltherrschaft [The Victims of War and the Rule of Violence]. (1937) Enlarged 1993. Berlin.
staring at the ceiling 