Nostalgia in Nitrate: Radio, Glamour, Women in Trouble (1930-60)

Hua Yang De Nian Hua is an archival short film composed by Wong Kar Wai.  You can find it on the Criterion release of In the Mood for Love or posted in various internet fora. It’s a lovely assemblage of clips from old nitrate films, inspiring more of the nostalgia one can already derive from the lush retro imagery and old radio broadcasts that compose the backdrop of Wong’s films. Wong’s work is the product of a multiplied nostalgia: the Chinese language title for In the Mood for Love derives from an old Chinese song from the 1940s; his late 90s depictions of 1960s Hong Kong display his own wistful daydreams of a time ago, and his films consistently center on lonely characters thinking of another, simpler time – pining for home.  I am a regular & devoted passenger of such train rides to the past, and so it was with great joy that I discovered a trove of 1930s Chinese silent movies on ye blessed ol Internet Archive.

It was at the Archive that my interest in Ruan Lingyu was piqued.  Ruan Lingyu was a 1930s Shanghai starlet – “the last of the silent divas.“  In 1935, at the age of 24, she poisoned herself by overdosing on barbiturates.  Reportedly, her funeral procession was three miles long, with three women committing suicide during the event. I asked my mother what she knew of her.  “People loved her.  Her life was not good – the men in her life were all … not good.”

Though glamorous offscreen, Ruan generally played characters struggling alone through grinding poverty and the most wretched of circumstances. In movies like Love and Duty (1931),  Peach Blossom Weeps Tears of Blood (1931), and Little Toys (1933), Ruan played women unrequited in love and beset by innumerable tragedies.  In Ruan’s best-known work, The Goddess (1934) (full length version available HERE on the Internet Archive), she played a devoted mother driven into prostitution to support her son in a gritty depiction of Shanghai’s urban realities:

Most interesting, though, is the talkie New Women (1934) (full length version available HERE).  In that film, Ruan played an educated, liberated woman who is beaten down by society until she resorts to suicide.  The film is supposedly based on the true life of Ai Xia, a young woman writer and actress who had committed suicide earlier in 1934, shortly after starring in her own scripted film, A Modern Woman. That Ruan herself committed suicide shortly after finishing the film adds another layer of irony.

Maggie Cheung, seen here in a still from Wong Kar Wai's Chungking Express, played Ruan in a biopic.

“Women in trouble.”  Perhaps “modern women in trouble.”  “Modern, independent women in trouble.”  That describes much of Wong Kar Wai’s work, and it arguably applies to the curatorial vision exercised by the San Francisco Asian Art Museum in its exhibit on Shanghai when it assembled a hallway of pinup advertising posters and old nitrate movies to represent the modernization of the city.   A few other attributes that unify these nostalgic visions:

• Glamour (as signified by coiffure / cigarettes):

• Mass Media / Music (the key to the door of nostalgia)

(I’m not positive but I think the above song is from Street Angel (1935) – another classic of the genre)

***

“He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.”

***

Shanghai runs through September 5, 2010 at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.