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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, ) and Crossroads (Shizi jietou, ), 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.

Engaging with fiction films devoted to heroic tales from the decade and a half between 1949 and 1966, this book reconceives state propaganda as aesthetic experiments that not only radically transformed acting, cinematography and screenwriting in socialist China, but also articulated a new socialist film theory and criticism. Rooted in the interwar avant-garde and commercial cinema, Chinese revolutionary cinema, as a state cinema for the newly established People's Republic, adapted Chinese literature for the screen, incorporated Hollywood narration, appropriated Soviet montage theory and orchestrated a new, glamorous, socialist star culture. In the wake of decolonisation, Chinese film journals were quick to project and disseminate the country's redefined self-image to Asia, Africa and Latin America as they helped to create an alternative vision of modernity and internationalism. Revealing the historical contingency of the term 'propaganda', Chan uncovers the visual, aural, kinaesthetic, sexual and ideological dynamics that gave rise to a new aesthetic of revolutionary heroism in world cinema. Based on extensive archival research, this book's focus on the distinctive rhetoric of post-war socialist China will be of value to East Asian Cinema scholars, Chinese Studies academics and those interested in the history of twentieth-century socialist culture. ; https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1364/thumbnail.jpg

Abstract
In his formalist reading, David Bordwell (2001: 73, 80) uses the term 'pause-burst-pause' pattern to refer to the 'cinematic expressivity' of Hong Kong action cinema. Although the 'pause-burst-pause' paradigm locates stasis and action that lie at the heart of the performance and cinematic representation of physical action, the 'pause-burst-pause' punctuation undergoes aesthetic transformation in the digital age. Through a comparative analysis of five representative films from the 1960s to the millennium, this article explores Hong Kong action cinema's historical evolution from the display of physical combat (swordplay, kung fu and gunplay) to intense psychological mind game and heightened aestheticization in four stylistic turns – fantastic, realist, formalist and digital. Wong Kar-wai's Yi dai zong shi/The Grandmaster (2013), following the box office success of transnational Chinese martial arts cinemas, serves as a prime example of the digital turn as postcolonial Hong Kong action cinema positions and articulates itself to an increasingly international film scene. Taking Lisa Purse's (2005: 152) notion of 'hypermediacy' as a springboard, I argue that the combined use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and aestheticized slow motion in The Grandmaster represents a new appreciation of slowness and softness, reinventing corporeal authenticity that the action genre is premised on.