New Women
About New Women
Wei Ming teaches music at a Shanghai girls' school and tries to sell a novel, The Tomb of Love. Dr. Wang, married to an old classmate, wants her as a concubine; when she refuses, he has the principal fire her. Her sister arrives with Wei's daughter Xiao Hong, who has pneumonia, and the hospital will not admit the child without money in advance. The publisher refuses an advance. Wei agrees to one night as a prostitute and finds that Wang is the client. She hits him and runs. The child dies. Wei takes sleeping pills, cries in the hospital that she wants to live and to take revenge, and dies. The publisher and a newspaper editor pay for the funeral as publicity. Her neighbor Aying leads the factory women out past a paper that announces the suicide.
Cast & crew
More about New Women
Cai Chusheng directed Sun Shiyi's script for United Photoplay Service, also called Lianhua. The released film is silent, with written Chinese intertitles. Censors cut "Huangpu River," Nie Er's revision of "Peach Blossom River."
Themes
Background
Released in Shanghai in February 1935, while left-wing studios and the commercial press were arguing over what a "new woman" owed her family, her work, and the papers.
In film history
Ruan's death a month after the opening tied the film to the gossip campaign against her. Lu Xun took the line attributed to her note as the title of an essay attacking the tabloids.
Making
Cai Chusheng built the script on Ai Xia's death rather than on a fictional original. Wei's novel inside the film is titled The Tomb of Love.
Reviews
Shanghai commercial papers called the portrait of journalists slander, and the Journalists' Union protested. One reviewer set Mrs. Wang, the factory worker Li Aying, and Wei Ming against each other as three kinds of women, and said Wei, caught between them, could not get free of a petit-bourgeois fate.
Look
Zhou Daming photographed the United Photoplay Service production.
Music
Nie Er and Zhou Can wrote the music. "Song of the New Women" closes the film, sung by Aying's factory chorus. Censors removed "Huangpu River."
Preservation
A print is held by the China Film Archive.
Notes
- The story follows actress Ai Xia, who killed herself in 1934 after writing and starring in A Modern Woman. The press had attacked her for one act of prostitution to pay for her daughter's medicine.
- It is Ruan Lingyu's penultimate film. She died on 8 March 1935, International Women's Day.
- A note circulated with the line "Gossip is a fearful thing" (人言可畏). Later researchers have argued that Tang Jishan forged it.
- That same 8 March the film was shown at a fundraiser for a women's educational centre, answering critics who said the story excused suicide.
- Zheng Junli plays the editor Yu Haichou, who refuses Wei and later takes her to the hospital. Yin Xu plays the factory worker Li Aying.
Scenes
- The hospital turns Xiao Hong away because the sisters cannot pay in advance.
- Wei's first client is Dr. Wang; she hits him and runs.
- Aying's factory women walk out over a newspaper announcing Wei's suicide.
Influenced by
- The life and 1934 suicide of actress Ai Xia
Also available
- Internet Archive (NewWomen)
- Wikimedia Commons (New Women.webm)
Quotes
I want to live, I want revenge.
