Ruan Lingyu deliv­ered one of the great­est per­for­mances in silent cin­e­ma, and yet to West­ern audi­ences, she is almost com­plete­ly unknown.

Up until the Impe­r­i­al Japan­ese Army invad­ed the city in 1937, Shang­hai was the thriv­ing, cos­mopoli­tan cul­tur­al heart of Chi­na. The first Chi­nese film was made in Shang­hai in 1905 and, for the next cou­ple of decades, cos­tumed retellings of tra­di­tion­al tales dom­i­nat­ed the indus­try. Then, in the ‘30s, film­mak­ers like Sun Yu and Cheng Bugao start­ed to make grit­ty, real­is­tic movies about the strug­gles of the low­er class. Per­haps the great­est of these films is Wu Yonggang’s 1935 mas­ter­piece The God­dess, fea­tur­ing an absolute­ly heart­break­ing per­for­mance by Ruan. You can watch it above.

On paper, the sto­ry of The God­dess could eas­i­ly be mis­tak­en for films by Josef Von Stern­berg or G.W. Pab­st – a “fall­en woman” weepie where the pro­tag­o­nist suf­fers for the sins of hyp­o­crit­i­cal soci­ety. Ruan plays the name­less lead, a beau­ti­ful, impov­er­ished woman forced to sell her body to feed and edu­cate her son. She soon falls in with The Boss, a porcine, dis­solute gang­ster who serves as her pimp. She scrapes and strug­gles to keep her son out of the same gut­ter where she finds her­self trapped. Yet, at every step, she and her son are taunt­ed and shunned. When she spends every­thing she has to put her son into a good school, the child is expelled sim­ply because the oth­er par­ents don’t approve of her. “Even though I am a degen­er­ate woman,” she begs to the school board, “don’t I have the right as a moth­er to raise him as a good boy?”

While silent film act­ing tend­ed towards the histri­on­ic, Ruan’s per­for­mance is nat­u­ral­is­tic while still hav­ing an emo­tion­al raw­ness that few actors could match. Just watch the scene where the pro­tag­o­nist is watch­ing her son per­form dur­ing a school play. Her expres­sion of unadul­ter­at­ed parental pride slow­ly cur­dles as she hears vicious whis­pers from near­by haus­fraus. Like Gre­ta Gar­bo or Mar­lene Diet­rich, Ruan has a wound­ed beau­ty that sim­ply riv­ets you to the screen.

Like many of the char­ac­ters she played, Ruan came from hum­ble begin­nings and had per­pet­u­al roman­tic trou­ble. When her com­pli­cat­ed per­son­al life became the fod­der for press, she took an over­dose of sleep­ing pills on March 8, 1935, leav­ing behind a note that read, “Gos­sip is a fear­ful thing.” She was only 24. Ruan’s funer­al pro­ces­sion was over three miles long and three women were report­ed­ly so dis­traught over her death that they com­mit­ted sui­cide. The funer­al even end­ed up on the front page of the New York Times who called it “the most spec­tac­u­lar funer­al of the cen­tu­ry.”

In 1992, Mag­gie Che­ung played Ruan for Stan­ley Kwan’s Cen­ter Stage (1992), which end­ed up win­ning a Best Actress prize at the Berlin Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val.

The God­dess will be added to our list of Great Silent Films, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics

A Page of Mad­ness: The Lost, Avant Garde Mas­ter­piece from the Ear­ly Days of Japan­ese Cin­e­ma (1926)

65 Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Free Online

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

Between 1908 and 1913, Amer­i­can film­mak­er D. W. Grif­fith made over 400 movies. Over that time, he, along with his fel­low Hol­ly­wood direc­tors, devel­oped con­ti­nu­ity edit­ing. Using such tools as match­ing eye­lines – cut­ting so that the actors appear to be look­ing at each oth­er across dif­fer­ent shots – and the 180-degree rule – which keeps the actors from switch­ing places on the screen – Grif­fith and his cohorts cre­at­ed a visu­al gram­mar that let audi­ences for­get the film’s arti­fice and dis­ap­pear into the sto­ry. By the time Grif­fith released his huge­ly influ­en­tial (and huge­ly racist) mas­ter­work A Birth of A Nation in 1915, the rules of con­ti­nu­ity edit­ing had more or less been worked out. This form of sto­ry­telling was so suc­cess­ful, and prof­itable, that it has been used for just about every Hol­ly­wood movie that has come out since.

Yet just as these rules were being cod­i­fied, film­mak­ers, most­ly Euro­pean, looked for oth­er ways to tell a sto­ry. Ger­man direc­tors like F. W. Mur­nau and Robert Wiene exper­i­ment­ed with cin­e­mat­ic depic­tions of the sub­con­scious. French film­mak­ers like René Clair used cam­era tricks and odd fram­ing to cre­ate works of for­mal beau­ty. But it was the film­mak­ers in the new­ly formed Sovi­et Union that real­ly con­tributed a new way of think­ing about film – Sovi­et Mon­tage. You can watch a video about it above.

When the Bol­she­vik Rev­o­lu­tion washed over the coun­try, the num­ber of films in the USSR dried up. One of the few movies avail­able at VGIK, aka The Moscow Film School, was Griffith’s sprawl­ing Intol­er­ance (watch it online here). Lev Kuleshov, a young teacher there, start­ed to take apart the movie and reorder the images. He dis­cov­ered that the mean­ing of a scene was rad­i­cal­ly changed depend­ing on the order of the shots. This led Kuleshov to try an exper­i­ment: he jux­ta­posed the image of a man with a blank expres­sion with a bowl of soup, a young corpse in a cof­fin and a pret­ty girl. You can watch it below.

Invari­ably, audi­ences praised the actor for his sub­tle­ty of per­for­mance. Of course, there was no per­for­mance. The con­nec­tion between the two images was made entire­ly with­in the head of the view­er. This real­iza­tion would for­ev­er be com­mem­o­rat­ed in film schools every­where as the Kuleshov Effect.

Using the French word for assem­ble, Kuleshov called this “mon­tage.” At the school, how­ev­er, there was con­sid­er­able debate over what mon­tage exact­ly was. One of Kuleshov’s stu­dents, Vsevolod Pudovkin envi­sioned each shot as a brick, one small part that togeth­er with oth­er small parts cre­at­ed a cin­e­mat­ic edi­fice.

Anoth­er stu­dent, Sergei Eisen­stein, pro­posed a far more dynam­ic, and rev­o­lu­tion­ary, form of mon­tage. Eisen­stein saw it “as an idea that aris­es from the col­li­sion of inde­pen­dent shots.” An intel­lec­tu­al well versed in the­o­ry, Eisen­stein com­pared mon­tage to Karl Marx’s vision of his­to­ry where a the­sis smash­es into its antithe­sis and togeth­er, from that wreck­age, forms its syn­the­sis.

Eisenstein’s great­est exam­ple of mon­tage, and indeed one of the great­est exam­ples of film­mak­ing ever, is the Odessa Steps scene from his mas­ter­piece Bat­tle­ship Potemkin. In it, Czarist sol­diers mas­sacre a group of pro­tes­tors, most­ly women and chil­dren. You can watch it below.

As you can see, it’s a pow­er­ful piece of pro­pa­gan­da. There is no way to come away from this movie and not feel like the Czarists are any­thing but mur­der­ous vil­lains. (Nev­er­mind that the movie is wild­ly inac­cu­rate, his­tor­i­cal­ly speak­ing.) Shots of a griev­ing moth­er jux­ta­posed with images of bay­o­net wield­ing troops result in a sur­pris­ing­ly vis­cer­al feel­ing of injus­tice.

In his writ­ings, Eisen­stein out­lined the vary­ing types of mon­tage – five kinds in all. The most impor­tant, in his eyes, was intel­lec­tu­al mon­tage – a method of plac­ing images togeth­er in a way to evoke intel­lec­tu­al con­cepts. He was inspired by how Japan­ese and Chi­nese can cre­ate abstract ideas from con­crete pic­tograms. For exam­ple, the Japan­ese sym­bol for tree is 木. One char­ac­ter for wall is 囗. Put the two togeth­er, 困, and you have the char­ac­ter for trou­ble, because hav­ing a tree in your wall is cer­tain­ly a huge pain in the ass. You can see an exam­ple of intel­lec­tu­al mon­tage in the end of the Odessa steps sequence when a stone lion seem­ing­ly ris­es to his feet.

Eisen­stein decid­ed to push this idea to the lim­it with his fol­low up, Octo­ber. The movie is deeply strange to watch now. In one famous sequence, Eisen­stein com­pares White Russ­ian gen­er­al Alexan­der Keren­sky to a pea­cock and to a cheap Napoleon fig­urine. It’s proved to be an inter­est­ing intel­lec­tu­al exer­cise but one that left audi­ences, both then and now baf­fled.

And below is anoth­er, slight­ly fun­nier, cer­tain­ly more con­tem­po­rary, exam­ple of intel­lec­tu­al mon­tage.

Many of the land­mark films men­tioned above can be found in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hitch­cock on the Filmmaker’s Essen­tial Tool: The Kuleshov Effect

Watch Bat­tle­ship Potemkin and Oth­er Free Sergei Eisen­stein Films

Jean-Luc Godard’s After-Shave Com­mer­cial for Schick

Watch Ten of the Great­est Silent Films of All Time — All Free Online

The Film­mak­ing of Susan Son­tag & Her 50 Favorite Films (1977)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

As much fun as Amer­i­cans have on Hal­loween, we could learn a thing or two from the Mex­i­cans. Their Día de los Muer­tos, the cel­e­bra­tion of which spans Octo­ber 31 to Novem­ber 2, gets more elab­o­rate, more seri­ous, and some­how more jovial at the same time. The robust Mex­i­can cul­ture of Los Ange­les, where I live, assures us a range of Día de los Muer­tos fes­tiv­i­ties each and every year, most impres­sive­ly the well-known cross-cul­tur­al blow-out at the Hol­ly­wood For­ev­er Ceme­tery. But I passed my most mem­o­rable Día de los Muer­tos on the cam­pus of the Uni­ver­si­dad Nacional Autóno­ma de Méx­i­co where, the year I went, they’d put togeth­er an entire field of shrines to the dead, nor­mal enough for the hol­i­day, but that time around they’d decid­ed to theme them all after Jorge Luis Borges sto­ries. (An Argen­tine, yes, but this has become a Latin Amer­i­can hol­i­day.) Every so often, the pow­er went out — Mex­i­co City, remem­ber — plung­ing the thou­sands of us there amid the hun­dreds of rep­re­sen­ta­tions of  “The Aleph,” “Funes the Mem­o­ri­ous,” and, appro­pri­ate­ly, “The Gar­den of Fork­ing Paths,” into peri­od­ic dark­ness.

As much as I would rec­om­mend such an expe­ri­ence, maybe you would­n’t want to make it your intro­duc­tion to the Mex­i­can Day of the Dead. Maybe you’d pre­fer this short film from famed design­ers (and, per­haps not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, Ange­lenos) Charles and Ray Eames, a film that paints a por­trait of Día de los Muer­tos through its icons and arti­facts just as their acclaimed Pow­ers of Ten paint­ed a por­trait of Earth at every scale. “In Mex­i­co,” explains its nar­ra­tor, “an inti­mate accep­tance of death extends far back into pre-His­pan­ic times. In the Aztec cul­ture which pre­ced­ed the com­ing of the Spaniards, death shows itself again and again — a famil­iar image. These ancient things of this land were joined over the cen­turies with the Span­ish cel­e­bra­tion of All Souls. Togeth­er they form a uni­ver­sal fes­ti­val of many facets and many dimen­sions — the Day of the Dead.” Through its cem­pasú­chitl flow­ers, its sug­ar skulls, and, yes, its angel-guid­ing rock­ets, The Day of the Dead exam­ines just what this end­less­ly fas­ci­nat­ing hol­i­day has, over the cen­turies, come to mean.

The Day of the Dead  (1957) will be added to our big col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down to the Bone: A Clay­ma­tion for The Day of the Dead

Design­ers Charles & Ray Eames Cre­ate a Pro­mo­tion­al Film for the Ground­break­ing Polaroid SX-70 Instant Cam­era (1972)

Charles & Ray Eames’ Icon­ic Film Pow­ers of Ten (1977) and the Less­er-Known Pro­to­type from 1968

Charles and Ray Eames’ Pow­ers of Ten: The Clas­sic Film Re-Imag­ined By 40 Artists

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.