Never the Twain Shall Meet: Touch, Double-Sidedness and Race in the Pages of Picture Show

Abstract

This chapter considers an ‘Art Supplement’ in Picture Show from 1921, analysing the relationship between the images on front and back of a double-page spread. The front image is of Lilian Gish and Richard Barthelmess from Way Down East (1920), while, on the reverse, ‘East & West in Screenland’ shows stills from films in which (East, West, and South) Asian characters have romantic relationships with white Europeans or Americans. These latter stills ‘freeze’ the moment of sexual frisson or contact that, in the films, could never be actualised, since censorship banning interracial relationships on screen required romance like these failed. These images thus form a subversive and alluring ‘underside’ to the more conventional relationship between (white) stars. While American films are discussed, they are analysed in the context of a specifically British movie magazine, which thus taps into British anxieties. The chapter also demonstrates the value of close analysis not only of page layout but also the magazine as a whole and of its status as a physical object. Through engagement with double-sidedness, connection and contact, the chapter demonstrates what might be lost through engaging solely with digital copies of magazines, which deny scholars the opportunity to feel and experience the materiality of the physical.