"Love and Duty (Lian'ai Yu Yiwu)" and "Shennu (The Goddess)," together with a third film, "Xin Nuxing (New Woman)," were screened for capacity audiences last month at the Sai Wan Ho Civic Centre Theatre in Hong Kong.

Live musical accompaniment was provided. The Beijing hit play "Ruan Ling-yu" was also performed and received enthusiastic reviews.

This wasn't the first time for the old Chinese silent films to be screened outside the mainland.

The Pordenone International Silent Film Festival in Sacile, Italy, in co-operation with the China Film Archives, screened 18 Chinese films in 1995. The overwhelming positive response of the audiences composed of archivists and scholars from all over the world resulted in a second round of films presented in 1997 at Cinema Muto in Italy. In 2000 the Guggenheim Museum in New York screened a retrospective of Chinese films concentrating on the Shanghai era as part of its exhibition "Dawn-5,000 Years of Chinese Art."

Although a Western invention, motion pictures are not new to China. The first films to be seen in Shanghai were shown by a cameraman from the French Lumiere Company in 1896.

A year later, American Edison films were screened. In 1903, Lin Chi-shen was the first Chinese to enter the film business in Beijing. He had been to the West and returned with a projector and movies.

Ten years later, the first fiction film directed and written by a Chinese was produced in Shanghai. By 1916, a wholly owned Chinese motion picture company was set up and in 1921 the initial feature-length Chinese film "Yan Ruisheng" was shot.

During the next decade and a half, 200 production houses produced thousands of films.

The golden age ended with the bombing of Shanghai by the Japanese in 1937.

The most famous leading lady of that era was Ruan Ling-yu, the Greta Garbo of Shanghai, who committed suicide in 1935 at the age of 25.

Ruan's legacy was that she symbolized the suffering of China in most of her movies.

Her roles in 29 films range through stories about a peasant who goes to the big city to seek her fortune, a single mother who becomes a prostitute to support her infant son, a girl who sacrifices everything so her sister can go to college, a farm maid who is seduced by the landlord's son, and a loving mother who leaves her children for the man she loves.

Ruan's acting captures both resiliency and dignity as she encapsulates the woes of her native land. Themes emerging from Ruan's and other Chinese films of the 1920s and 1930s are poverty, toil, suffering of the people, the sanctity of the family, foreign invaders, and strong women - usually mothers holding their families together in times of crisis.

Ruan's two greatest features are "Love and Duty (Lian'ai Yu Yiwu)," directed by Bu Wancang in 1931 and "Shennu (The Goddess)," directed by Wu Yonggang in 1934. In the former, she plays the role of a lifetime. Ruan appears first as a schoolgirl, then a wife, a mother, an outcast, an old woman, and her teen-age daughter. To view this 20-year-old actress aging on screen without special effects is to appreciate her subtle visual portrayals.

Critics say that in "The Goddess," the name given to prostitutes by their clients, Ruan played her most memorable role, a mother who is forced to turn to prostitution to pay for her son's education. When the school's directors discover what she does for a living, the boy is expelled. Later, she kills a gangster in self-defence but is sent to jail. When she hears from the kind headmaster that he is caring for her boy, Ruan's complex emotional response once again demonstrates her acting skills. The film asks whether "The Goddess" was moral in what she did to feed and raise her child.

Not every motion picture produced during those years was a tragedy. Comedies about country and city life, period dramas based on Tang (AD 618-907) and Ming (1368-1644) dynasty stories, Kungfu epics, and even copies of Hollywood features were brought to the audiences.

Audiences in the West will realize that the Chinese film industry produced well-directed productions before "Ju Dou" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" were seen around the world.

Meyer is Visiting Professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong

(China Daily June 11, 2002)