China is turning to a 1930s prostitute with a heart of gold — played by a doomed actress — to arouse a cinematic renaissance and fend off a cultural onslaught from Hollywood.
The 1934 silent movie The Goddess (神女) was made during a golden period for the Shanghai film industry, when its studios were the center of Chinese-language cinematography.
In the film, a woman is driven into prostitution to educate her young son after her husband’s suicide. Gossipy neighbors reveal her profession to the boy’s school, forcing him to leave. She eventually murders a gambler for stealing her money, ending up in jail.
A new digital restoration of the movie was recently shown at the Shanghai Film Festival, after the state-backed China Film Archive, set up in 1958 by then-premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來) and the guardian of the country’s cinematic history, opened up its vaults.
It is one of several re-masterings that come as Beijing tries to extend its soft power by exporting Chinese culture around the world and build a stronger movie industry able to compete internationally.
“The Goddess deserves being seen as the pinnacle of the Chinese silent film era,” archive director Sun Xianghui (孫向輝) said.
Overseas audiences saw the new print of the movie, many for the first time, a few weeks ago in Paris.
China has in the past been “very backward” on film preservation, said Linda Johnson, lecturer on Chinese film and convener for the film club of the Royal Asiatic Society (RAS) in Shanghai.
However, the refurbishment drive is helped by the selection of films which match the ruling Communist Party’s view of history.
Other movies chosen for the project include Laborer’s Love (勞工之愛情) from 1922, said to be among the earliest examples of Chinese film, about a fruit-seller.
A Chinese academic, who declined to be named, said: “The Goddess is representative of a leftist critique of society, so the Communist Party has all along held the movie in high esteem.”
Linda Wong Davies, founder of the KT Wong Foundation which commissioned a new musical score for The Goddess, described the project as “China restoring its own past, its own great history.”
“As China re-joins the world as a major industrial nation, they’re very keen to let the rest of the world understand who we are,” she said.
The Goddess is virtually unknown to Western audiences, but critics say it compares favorably to foreign silent films of the same era, in large part due to lead actress Ruan Lingyu (阮玲玉), who plays the cheongsam-clad prostitute.
Ruan acted in 29 films, only nine of which survive, before killing herself over two unfaithful lovers at the age of 24 in 1935. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets of Shanghai for her funeral procession.
“She was the most popular actress of her day,” Johnson said. “Ruan Lingyu is marvelous in the way she can convey emotion, almost dialogue, through her body language.”
However, restored films have found only a niche audience in China compared to Hollywood blockbusters. Shanghai held just two screenings of The Goddess, though viewers paid more than US$30 for tickets.
“Restoring this kind of film is not very profitable from a commercial angle,” Chinese film critic Raymond Zhou (周黎明) said.
In contrast, Transformers: Age of Extinction had its Chinese premiere at the same film festival and went on to earn more than US$300 million, becoming the biggest grossing movie ever in the country and prompting soul-searching among cultural officials.
The Chinese government said in June that it would invest $16 million annually to fund five to 10 “influential” films, and offer the domestic industry some tax breaks.
“It must be recognized that we are in a full state of competition with American films,” China’s film bureau head Zhang Hongsen (張宏森) was quoted as saying by state media. “This is about defending and fighting for cultural territory.”
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