A Revisionist Reading of The Goddess: Visual Narrative Power in Chinese Silent Cinema

This article argues for a revisionist reading of The Goddess to redirect critical attention to its film form and narrative style. Yet, it also explores the social-economic and technological conditions of filmmaking in early Chinese cinema that circumvented the filmmaker’s aesthetic choices and devices. A political reading of the film within either the leftist-progressive or nationalist agenda is inadequate in explicating the film’s narrative capacity and affective power in engaging social commentary. Reading The Goddess as a Chinese manifestation of Hollywood’s maternal melodrama has equally dismissed the film’s contestation of the complex political and ideological discourses in which it was produced. Inspired by a neoformalist approach to studying film form and social reality, this article articulates the working of Wu Yonggang’s cinematic style as a crafted combination of artistic choices and interventions, which are made within the classical Hollywood paradigm and Soviet montage, to define an early Chinese cinematic language that is specific to 1930s Shanghai film industry and Chinese society, the filmmaker’s aesthetic pursuit, and Ruan Lingyu’s stardom.