In Shanghai, silent film actress Ruan Lingyu was among the biggest stars of her generation. After first rising to fame as a teen actress in the late 1920s, Lingyu joined the LianHua film studio in 1930 and soon became its major attraction. Over the next six years she anchored some of the most important films of the era, including Love and Duty, which screens at MIFF on the August 6, and The Goddess.

The Goddess is a tragic silent drama about a single mother battling patriarchal tyranny as she resorts to prostitution in order to raise her son and earn enough money to send him through school. Given the uninspired staging, occasionally drab cinematography and laborious plot, it’s easy to understand how esteem for Lingyu’s performance has outlasted appreciation for the picture’s technical virtues. Lingyu breathes emotional depth into the benevolent figure of the mother. Rare, carefree moments highlighting her lovely smile and beguiling radiance contrast the oppressive melancholy at the heart of the tragic story. When overbearing male figures dominate her later in the film, her tempestuous vexation allows her to exploit a whole different set of mannerisms.

Silent movies are hardly ever watched in silent auditoriums, so it was unfortunate that the one and only screening of The Goddess lacked a live music accompaniment. This prevented the modern audience from viewing a silent picture as originally intended.

One year after The Goddess was theatrically released, and before anyone had a chance to cast her in a sound picture, Ruan Lingyu committed suicide. She was 24-years-old. Since then, her life and career has been immortalised on celluloid thanks to Stanley Kwan’s Actress (known in Australia as Centre Stage, 1992), which features Maggie Cheung in the role of the silent glamour queen.