Kenny K. K. Ng* A Revisionist Reading of The Goddess: Visual Narrative Power in Chinese Silent Cinema https://doi.org/10.1515/jcfs-2021-0021 Published online March 10, 2023 Abstract: 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 neo- formalist 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 para- digm 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. Keywords: classical Hollywood, melodrama, Ruan Lingyu, silent cinema, The God- dess, Wu Yongggang 1 Significance of Revisionist Reading In Center Stage (Yun ling yuk, 1992), a biographical film about the Chinese silent screen actress Ruan Lingyu (1910–1935), Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan reenacts a brilliant scene in The Goddess (Shennü, 1934) directed by Wu Yonggang (1907–1982), which stages the actress’s remarkable performance of smoking. Pursued by a policeman, the heroine (played by Ruan Lingyu) unwittingly runs into the house of a villain. The vicious man demands sexual reciprocation for hiding her from the police. After a few point-of-view (POV) exchanges between the two, it cuts to a close- up of Ruan’s face—which changes from an expression of reluctance to one of *Corresponding author: Kenny K. K. Ng, Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University, CVA 9/F, 5 Hereford Road, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong. E-mail: kennykkng@hkbu.edu.hk J. Chin. Film Stud. 2023; 3(1): 103–123