The screen kiss in 1937: Re-reading Street Angel and Crossroads

Abstract

This article traces the evolution of the screen kiss and the discourse surrounding it in Republican Shanghai leftwing cinema in the 1930s. The period from the 1910s to the 1930s in semi-colonial Shanghai witnessed an influx of Hollywood motion pictures that featured the screen kiss. By the 1930s, the circulation of images of Hollywood screen kiss in semi-colonial Shanghai triggered erotic imagination, comparison with Hollywood norms and most importantly the desire to appropriate, if not to reproduce, Hollywood screen kisses despite censorship. Two Shanghai leftist films, Street Angel (Malu tianshi, Yuan 1937) and Crossroads (Shizi jietou, Shen 1937), released shortly before the second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, appropriated and subverted Hollywood representational conventions of the screen kiss, fulfilling both the entertainment and pedagogical functions of cinema by constructing a sexually desiring and potentially class-conscious subject with aspirations for free love and social betterment at a critical moment of national crisis.1