Cinema
The Goddess
神女
Wu Yonggang · 1934
Synopsis
In Shanghai, a single mother sells herself on the street to raise her son. During a police roundup, she hides at the home of a thug known as the Boss; he makes her his possession and takes her earnings to gamble. She tries to flee, but he finds her and threatens the child. She then hides her savings behind a wall panel to pay for school. At school, the boy is called a bastard, the parents learn what his mother does for a living and demand his expulsion; the headmaster comes to see her at home.
Context
The film was released in Shanghai on 7 December 1934, produced by Lianhua; it runs eighty-five minutes. The title means a goddess and has also long served as a euphemism for a prostitute. Wu Yonggang wrote that he would have liked to show more of the real life of these women, but that censorship prevented him, and that he centred the film on maternal love. He remade it himself in 1938. The China Film Archive restored it from the only known print; the restored version was shown in 2014, among other places at the Cinémathèque française.
Who it is for
A silent film of under an hour and a half, with Chinese intertitles; it exists on DVD, notably from the BFI, with a score by Zou Ye.
Prizes and reception
The Hong Kong Film Awards placed it in 2005 among the hundred best Chinese films, and Chen Kaige regarded it as his favourite film of the thirties.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.