Movies

The Nouvelle Vague or the New Wave started in France and spread to Sweden. It soon caught up in India and then in Italy. The Argentinean and Spanish New Waves soon followed suit. What was the New Wave It was a movement, a revolution However, it was not a revolution of arms  it was a revolution of film. Completely unlike the mainstream films of the time, this movement was principally a new pattern of movie-making, a new way of telling stories, but simultaneously, it was also much more than that. It was a rise of a completely new culture, a path-breaking political statement and above all, it was a representation of the socio-cultural situation of the country at the time. It was the voice of the people, which needed to be heard.

In China, the film industry saw this Movement with the rise of the leftist films, the left-wing filmmakers works of art, which started with the May Fourth Movement in the 1919. During this time, the youth of the country was largely dissatisfied by the new rulers of the country and agitated at the encroachment of Chinese land by the Japanese. They revolted against both by way of protests and soon, this agitation of the youth turned into a cultural movement  a shift of power which saw the powerless proletariats and intellectuals wanting to become the leaders of the country. This revolution also started reflecting in the films of the country at the time of the 1920s and 1930s when the young left-wing filmmakers of the country wanted to emulate the Western ideals and reconstruct a free, empowered nation  China.

Women in Chinese Films Prior to the Movement
Before the advent of the May Fourth Movement, the womens roles in the Chinese films were largely cosmetic. The films were influenced by the western styles and stories as they were mostly produced by the foreign production houses who had built bases in and around Shanghai. With a Western story, a Chinese cast and overseas technicians, the Chinese film industry saw decent monetary success. The more traditional stories were made in the later stages of this period.

The True Progressive Chinese Cinema
However, the Chinese industry started its rise earnestly in the 1930s with the advent of the leftist or progressive films. These were the films where the stories diverged from the western-influenced stories and started focusing on the Chinese socio-cultural situations, Chinese people and Chinese enemies. The studios concentrated on making films which would convey a message to the people of the country  that a struggle was on, that the centre of power was shifting and that everyone needed to take a stand. In the making of these films came the ultimate empowerment of the female actors of China, they were given more substantial roles, many a times being made the protagonists of the film itself. Stories were crafted around women and strong women characters were portrayed by supremely talented actresses like Yin Minzhu, Zhang Zhiyu, Hu Die and Ruan Lingyu.

This period saw an undaunted flow of progressive films which were also commercial hits like Three Modern Women, Womens Outcry, The Sisters and many others. The one thing which was glaringly obvious, however, was that though the films portrayed the female characters overcoming various struggles and coming out as heroes, the Leftist Cinema Movement was entirely run by males. No woman was a part of the making of any Leftist film in any capacity. At this time, men chose to tell their stories through the female characters. The Chinese woman was used to represent the oppressed class, the Chinese proletariat fighting against the bourgeoisie society and coming out victorious.

Although women were given the most power-packed roles to play, ranging from the prostitute to the factory worker to the new age professional, their role in the making of a film was often restricted to the male ideologies. Men, even in this Golden Age of the Chinese Cinema, used women to represent the male fantasies of the New Age Woman, to show the constant struggle between a dissatisfied and eager to rise oppressed and as overpowering, overbearing oppressor. Shuqin Cui, the famous Chinese film historian pointed out that The early film production frames womens problems to signify the need for national awakening while using star images to attract audiences (and) how socialist cinema presents woman as either a victim of class oppression or a beneficiary of national liberation (2003). Women were not yet given the freedom to enact their roles, free of the male gaze.

The New Woman  the New Woman question
In those times, the question of the New Woman was often raised  who is she What is she like What ideals and ideologies does she embody In a response to all these questions, the answer was quite simple  to the newly struggling Chinese proletariat, the New Woman was the embodiment of all their political ideologies and nationalist sentiments. External manifestations, Edwards argued, like hair, clothes and dresses were immaterial to the New Woman. She principally represented the modern Chinese woman, for whom national welfare was a primary concern. The new woman was conceived as politically aware, patriotic, independent, and educated (2000). The New Woman was a woman awakened, a woman who performed as many duties as a man with respect to revolutionizing the population of her country and fighting against oppression.

Here so far, the New Woman in films was a reality  the women in the leftist films were not only politically awakened and economically independent, they were also a part of the woman types  the worker, the prostitute or the professional. However, this is where the departure from the definition of a typical New Woman began.

The New Woman  Ruan Lingyu and Xin Nxing
The talented leftist director Cai Chusheng, in 1935, produced a remarkable woman-oriented progressive film with the lead actress of the time, Ruan Lingyu as the New Woman. This movie was based on the life of another woman, Al Xia, who was a writer and actress, who committed suicide because of the vicious attack of the media on her personal life (Harris, 1995).

A hard working music teacher and a part time composer and writer, Wei Ming (Ruan) is the typical New Age Woman  beautiful, young, financially independent and living without any male support. However, she soon finds out that this modernity is only superficial as she faces the real world where her publisher only wants to publish her book if her photo appears on the cover page and the trustee (Mr. Wang) of the school she works in, makes indecent passes at her while being married to her friend from school (Mrs. Wang). She is friends with a young man (Yu Haichou) who helps her where he can, but firmly rejects all her advances and flirtations, and a woman, Li Aying, who is a factory worker who also teaches the women of her factory songs of patriotism and courage.

Soon after, we see that Wei Mings daughter, the product of a failed marriage who is living with her aunt, falls ill and has to return to her mothers home. Her troubles get worse when she turns down Mr. Wang and he vengefully gets her fired from her teaching job. Wei has no money for her daughters treatment and she finally resorts to selling her body in return for some desperate money. However, even this does not seem to work for her when her first client is Dr. Wang who she escapes from, a second time. With no way to save her daughter, she silently watches her die. This trauma adds to her already precarious hold on a sane and healthy mind and she decides to end her life. Her friends, Mrs. Wang and Yu, succeed in getting her to the hospital in the nick of time and when she comes to consciousness, she screams out to the camera that she wants to live. Soon after, as the film ends, we see a newspaper clipping of her obituary.

This is the pathbreaking film, New Woman, in a nutshell.

The New Woman Incident
Although today this film holds the place of a classic in the world cinema map, the time it was released it had to face severe criticism from the reporters and journalists at the unflattering image of the media shown in the film. They also forced major reedits of the film and a public apology from the production house, Lianhua Company. They wrote many unflattering articles about Ruan Lingyu who was going through a painful public divorce at the time and the vengeful mud-slinging and image-bashing engaged in by the media contributed to the talented actresss suicide a few days after the release of the film, on International Womens Day, 8th March, 1935.

This incident, dubbed as the New Woman incident, became a most controversial subject in the days to come as the people realized the responsibilities of the media and journalism and at the same time as the power of their own public opinion (Harris, 1995). Debate also ensued over the symbolic significance of the New Woman and what she really stood for. The uncanny resemblance between real life (Al Xia) and the occurrences in the film and then again its repetition in real life (Ruan) set many a pens writing about the accountability of the Press while at the same time the women begun to be categorized as traditional women and New Women.

New Woman  a Film Study
In New Woman, Ruans character is an amalgamation of modernist values and traditional, socially bound mentality. She is a character who is constantly striving to make an independent living but cannot manage to do so because of the many confines of the society. Although sometimes this seems to be the case, many a times it comes across as her own reluctance to completely tear down the restrictions of the society and move out on her own in this world and make a living, away from the men in it. She seems to be a strange convergence point of all the contradictory values of a New Woman and a Traditional Woman. In fact, the movie New Woman, in itself, embodies many a contradictions in its many layered folds.

Ruan is an educated, new age, independent woman, yet she depends on her friend Yu to get her work. She also seems to flirt with him to draw his attention. She seems to lack the basic ingredient of a New Woman  confidence in her abilities and a will to make it on ones own in this world. She is economically independent, yet she in unable to gain in confidence. She seems to require a male presence to make her feel secure. Contrast this to the factory worker and her friend, Aying, who is a completely independent woman who seems to fight her own battles as well as gives courage to everyone else to do the same. Ruan falls ruefully short on the independent count.

On another count, Wei Ming is a moderately well doing woman who works her way through life. She is supposedly an opposite to her flashy friend Mrs. Wang who is the typical personification of the wily female  she has tantrums and she has her ways of getting men to do her bidding. Mrs. Wang is fond of jewellery, as in seen in many a scenes when her diamond rings and jewellery ubiquitously sparkle directly into the camera. Wei Ming, on the other hand, should be shown as completely disinterested in superficial looks and trappings, as being a New Woman, but she too seems to be just as vulnerable to the superficial, when one notices the details like the various photographs of her in her home, the way she gazes at herself in the mirror from time to time, etc. When the publisher has to print the manuscript initially, he is disinterested but when he sees her picture and realizes that she is a beautiful, young woman, he promptly agrees. She is commodified to an extent  the camera enjoys her show of beauty. The film seems to constantly switch between a subjective and objective view of the New Woman.

Similarly, when one sees the scene where Wei is travelling in Mr. Wangs car, accompanying him to the cabaret ball, she looks out the window while silently sulking about her situation. Here, in a mise-en-scene she sees her introduction to the antagonist on the car window, again juxtaposing her helplessness in the present to the cause of it in the past. The window becomes her mirror of the past where she ruefully realizes that there is no getting away from the commodifying of her as a woman. At the same time, the audience is asked to sympathise with her when she regretfully shakes her head to the image and thereby seems to appeal to the audience for sympathy and understanding. This again, seems to be telling the audience that she is just another woman struggling for independence, not the heroic figure which the audience might be expecting her to be.

This is juxtaposed to the background of huts and slums, again contradicting the grandiose which is within her reach if she agrees to become a commodity of the bourgeoisie and the poverty which lies in her way if she refuses. It seems that she has to make this choice and this continues in the next scene when she watches the dance in the hall, sitting next to Mr. Wang, and suddenly sees herself in the place of the dancers  essentially imagining herself as a means of entertainment to the affluent  a fate which a New Woman would never accept and is completely against.

However, in opposition to this again, we see that when Wang proposes marriage to her, despite of his much-married status, she angrily tells him off,  saying that she is not looking to become anybodys slave. This is very much in line with the widely accepted ideology of the left-wing, where the intellectual youth fights against the oppression of the rulers. Similarly, when she identifies herself with the dancer is shackles, the director also somehow tries to show us that though she may think that she wont give in to the bourgeoisie pressures, she is, in all essence, powerless to stop the same.

The camera also frequently seems to take on the male gaze every once in a while, adoring the actress, her beauty, having the camera do a series of shots of her which seem to show her as a beautiful woman, a woman lusted after by her employer and adored by the publisher. It seems that while the director wants the audience to identify with her and her cause and everything she represents, he also wants them to see her as a commodity, a woman who is available because she has no male protector, no money and many mouths to feed.

Contrast this with the two other women in the film  both representing individual characteristics of their own. One is a sniggering and condescending bourgeoisie who is constantly looking down at Weis possessions and accomplishments. She employs her feminine wiles to get her husband to gift her what she desires and has everything and would want for nothing. Aying on the other hand is the complete opposite to Wang. She works hard on a daily basis, fights for causes that she believes in and has few worldly possessions. She helps out her fellow colleagues and has a purpose in life which she ardently supports.

In contrast to these two, Weis character seems to be woefully confused, and towards the end, woefully weak as she succumbs to the various pressures of the outside world even as she fervently screams and appeals to the audience to let her live.

The New Woman  separating the Myth from the Reality
Dreams are fine but money is essential said Xun Lu while talking to a group of women. In practical life, he is correct. But the argument does not end there. He asks that if the traditional New Woman character of Nora from the Norwegian literature had not in fact left her home, would she have been happier, as her husbands puppet Or was she happy after she walked out on a financially secure life (1923). Perhaps, the answer for this seems to lie in New Woman as we realize that if we correlate Wei to Nora, then either Wei was an inadequate woman as compared to her Norwegian counterpart or Nora must have had a terrible life after she walked out.

Yet, as we see the other characters in the film, those of Wang and especially Aying, we realize that Weis character was just trapped into her own mire of limitations and weaknesses. While Aying manages to strike out on her own and follow through on the ideals of nationalism and patriotism, Wei never quite manages to sort her own life out and keeps struggling to attain what she does not seem to know she desires. Wang, on the other hand, is happy as the traditional woman and has grown into being spoilt.

Ming wrote in his essay, Seeing New Woman, The New Woman is a call to arms for humanity and society. It offers a model for the spirit of the new women (1936). Aying fits the bill perfectly. So, in essence of the typical definition of the New Woman, Aying is the only woman in the film who fits the bill. She is confident, she is patriotic and most of all, she is the one who is constantly striving towards to welfare of her country.

The Real New Woman
The Chinese audience of the leftist movies have always seen comedy and tragedy in strange ways. When its time for sacrifice, if the martyr is bold and daring, they applaud the tragedy if the victim is timid and distraught, they see it as comedy. However, what they see in New Woman is the martyrdom of who they think embodies the ideals of the struggling proletariat  the masses  until she gives up and takes her own life. Yet, instead of signifying a death of the struggle, the film ends with the songs of Aying and her coworkers filling the auditorium, signifying one thing for sure  that with the true New Woman, the fight lives on.