On the night of 7 March 1935, Shanghai’s most beloved actress went home from a farewell dinner with her colleagues, wrote two letters, took an overdose of sleeping pills, and died the following afternoon, on International Women’s Day, at the age of twenty-four. Ruan Lingyu’s funeral brought the city to a standstill: her coffin was followed through the streets by a procession that contemporary reports numbered in the hundreds of thousands, one of the largest public gatherings Shanghai had ever seen, a grief so vast that foreign newspapers compared it to the mourning for Valentino. She had been, for the previous five years, the face of what was then the largest film industry outside America. The industry she died in the middle of, golden-age Shanghai cinema, is the answer to the fantasy described in the previous essay on this site: while Hollywood was inventing an imaginary Shanghai of neon and intrigue, the real Shanghai was inventing itself on screen, in Mandarin, and producing, for one brilliant decade, some of the finest films made anywhere in the world.
Electric shadows on the Bund
The movies arrived in China almost immediately. The first film screening in the country took place in a Shanghai teahouse in August 1896, less than a year after the Lumière brothers’ first show in Paris, and the first Chinese-made fiction film, a record of a Peking opera excerpt, followed in 1905. But it was in Shanghai, and in the 1920s and 1930s, that the industry became an industry, for reasons that were the treaty’s as much as the artist’s: the concessions gave filmmakers capital, imported equipment, and a degree of shelter from censors and warlords, and the city gave them the audience, the largest urban middle class in Asia. Studios multiplied through the 1920s, and two came to dominate. The Mingxing company, founded in 1922, built the mass audience with martial-arts serials and family melodramas. The Lianhua company, United Photoplay, founded in 1930 by the impresario Lo Ming-yau, set out to make cinema respectable and modern, and recruited the talent that would define the decade. By the mid-1930s Shanghai had scores of studios, dozens of movie palaces, including the Grand Cinema on Bubbling Well Road, a 1933 art-deco masterpiece by the architect László Hudec, and a fan culture of magazines, columnists and devoted crowds that Hollywood itself would have recognized.
The actress
Ruan Lingyu’s life read, even to her contemporaries, like one of her films. She was born in 1910 to a poor Shanghai family; her father died when she was six; her mother worked as a maid, and begged for her daughter’s schooling. At sixteen, spotted in a screen test, Ruan made her debut for Mingxing in 1926, and over nine years she made twenty-nine films, most of them now lost, as almost all of China’s silent cinema is lost, and rose from decorative ingénue roles to performances of a subtlety that still startles viewers today. Silent acting lives or dies on the face and the hands, and Ruan’s could carry an entire moral education in a look. Her masterpiece is The Goddess, made in 1934 for Lianhua by the young director Wu Yonggang, in which she plays a Shanghai prostitute working the streets to raise her small son, a role the film treats not as titillation or scandal but as a study in dignity. Watching it now, in the restored print, the modernity is shocking: the composition, the restrained camera, and at the centre Ruan’s performance, tender, wary, and finally blazing. It is routinely counted among the greatest silent films ever made, by anyone, anywhere.
Her last completed film was New Women, released in early 1935, in which she played a woman writer hounded to suicide by the tabloid press and predatory men. The film was based on the real suicide of the actress Ai Xia, and the Shanghai press, stung by its portrayal, responded by proving its point: the gossip columns turned on Ruan herself, dissecting her disastrous private life, her estranged gambler husband suing her, her new relationship, in a campaign of prurient cruelty. Weeks later she was dead. Her suicide note, at least as it entered legend, contained the four characters that became a Chinese proverb: ren yan ke wei, gossip is a fearful thing. The note’s authenticity has been debated ever since, there were competing versions and interested parties, but the phrase detached itself from the evidence and entered the language, which is its own verdict. She was twenty-four. A film about a woman destroyed by the press had become, in the press, the story of its own star.
Left turn at Lianhua
Ruan’s story is the glamorous tragedy of the golden age, but the decade’s deeper current was political, and it flowed from an unexpected alliance. After the Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1932 burned much of the studio district, the industry turned, with startling speed, to social realism, and the writers who shaped it included underground Communists like Xia Yan and Tian Han, working through left-wing filmmakers who saw the cinema as the one mass medium that could reach a country of four hundred million. The result, between 1932 and 1937, was a burst of films that remain the classics of Chinese cinema: Spring Silkworms, about the collapse of a silk-farming family under the world market; Little Toys and The Big Road, Sun Yu’s muscular, patriotic epics; Song of the Fishermen, a story of fishing-village poverty that ran for eighty-four days in Shanghai and in 1935 became the first Chinese film to win an international prize, at Moscow; and in 1937, on the very eve of destruction, Street Angels, Yuan Muzhi’s teeming, tender portrait of teahouse singers, trumpet players and slum life, which opened with a montage of the neon city and then walked behind the facades to show who paid for the lights. Street Angels made a star of the teenage singer Zhou Xuan, whose theme song, The Wandering Songstress, outlived the studio, the war and the century, and is hummed in China to this day.
The star system the decade built was formidable. Beside Ruan Lingyu stood Butterfly Wu, Hu Die, crowned the country’s first elected Movie Queen in 1933 by a newspaper poll; Li Lili, the athletic sweetheart of Sun Yu’s sports films; and a generation of actors, Zhao Dan above all, who would carry Chinese film through the war and into the 1950s. Sound arrived in 1931 with Sing-Song Girl Red Peony, its soundtrack recorded on wax discs, and the talkie transition, far from killing the industry as it did in so many countries, fed it: Chinese audiences wanted Mandarin voices, and Shanghai’s cinema became, along with the record industry that grew from the same studios, the engine that spread the shidaiqu pop songs across Asia. Film and song were one ecosystem, and its capital was a five-mile stretch of the concessions.
The light goes out
It ended, as everything in that city did, in 1937. The Japanese invasion that opened the eight-year war, the same war this site’s earlier essay followed from the Marco Polo Bridge, reached Shanghai in August of that year, and the great battle that followed destroyed the studio district and scattered the industry. Some filmmakers and stars trekked inland to Wuhan and Chongqing to make resistance films for the government; some went south to Hong Kong, seeding the industry that would flower there for half a century; some stayed in the foreign concessions, the so-called orphan island, and kept filming until December 1941, when the Pacific war swallowed the concessions too. The golden age was over, after less than a decade, and the war and what followed consumed most of its physical legacy: of the many hundreds of films made in Shanghai before 1937, only a fraction survive, nitrate being a fragile medium and the twentieth century in China being hard on fragile things.
What survived has been having a second life. The Goddess, restored, tours the world’s cinematheques and appears on critics’ lists of the greatest silent films. Street Angels is in the canon. In 1991 the Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan made Center Stage, with Maggie Cheung as Ruan Lingyu, interweaving the life, the films and the legend, and introducing the golden age to a new international audience; Cheung’s performance, and the film’s loving archaeology, won prizes around the world. And in Shanghai itself the memory has been institutionalized: the Grand Cinema still shows films under Hudec’s deco ceilings, and the Shanghai Film Museum walks visitors through the decade when the city was, by output and ambition, the Hollywood of the East.
That phrase is usually meant as praise, and it is, but it is also slightly wrong, and the correction is the point of this essay. The Hollywood comparison makes Shanghai the echo. The truth runs the other way: in the 1930s Shanghai needed no one’s permission and no one’s template. It had its own capital, its own studios, its own stars, its own scandals and its own conscience, and it made, in The Goddess and Street Angels, films that hold their place beside anything made in California in the same years. The fantasy Shanghai of the American movies, the neon city of gangsters and sing-song girls, was a dream about China. The real Shanghai was too busy making its own dreams to notice, on celluloid, in Mandarin, for an audience of millions, until the war turned the lights off. They are on again now. The projector never really stopped; it only waited for the city to be rebuilt.
