In this social drama, Ruan Lingyu, the “Garbo of the East”, plays a single mother who becomes a sex worker so that her young son can get a decent education. The film depicts the social exclusion of mother and son to impressive effect, exploring the themes of poverty, double standards in society and the hard life of women in Shanghai in the 1930s. THE GODDESS is considered a masterpiece of Chinese silent cinema: deeply emotional, critical of society and featuring an outstanding performance by leading actress Ruan Lingyu, whose memory has been honoured with this new restoration.

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GODDESS is iconic in multiple senses. It creates a compelling image of the figure of the fallen woman, and by extension of Shanghai as a corrupt metropolis, and it cemented the iconography of Ruan Lingyu herself as a screen “goddess” in her prime who was to die by her own hand just a few months later. GODDESS itself, in turn, came to be emblematic of the glamor and pathos of Shanghai cinema’s first golden age.
The film’s title carries a double meaning: “shennü” suggests a supernatural female (a “nüshen”), but the term in 1920s Shanghai was also a euphemism for prostitute. The virtuous prostitute was a familiar trope. One of modern China’s first best sellers was the 1895 translation of Alexandre Dumas fils’ “La dame aux camellias” (1848), a novel about a beautiful, free-spirited, but doomed Parisian courtesan. GODDESS shares with the Dumas novel an emotional register of pathos, sympathy, condescension, and sexual titillation, all wrapped up in a rescue fantasy.
Fallen woman films, which focus on the figure of a sexually transgressive and suffering woman, were a fixture of silent cinema. […] Wu Yonggang recalled in his memoir that D. W. Griffith’s WAY DOWN EAST (1920), in which Lilian Gish’s character is tricked into a sham marriage and abandoned while pregnant, was a formative influence on his filmmaking.
Christopher Rea, Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949. New York, 2021