In a 1922 issue of Cine Popular (Barcelona), the fan magazine writer calling himself ‘Aurello’ asks the question on every reader's mind: ‘what would the cinema be without kisses?’ ‘The kiss’, he explains, ‘belongs to the cinema as do punches, cowboys and pistol shots’ (Aurello 1922: 1). Fourteen years later in Cinegramas (1936), a writer used the same analogy: ‘the authentic kiss was, well, something as consubstantial to romance movies as was “the real pistol” to Westerns’ (De la Rosa 1936). Like the pistol, kissing endowed the medium with its ‘final mark’, its seal of identity: ‘In cinematography [the kiss] is like a seal, a stamp, the postscript finale’ (De la Rosa 1936). Fans eagerly awaited, and expected, kissing with its symbolic and haptic compensation. And for good reason. Cinema's sensuous, erotic impact was carried not only by corporeal violence – punches or pistols – but also bodily ecstasy experienced in the vision of two mouths coming together and the gesture, and later sound, of an ecstatic breath (Aurello 1922). As one magazine writer put it, ‘let's not forget the very special case of the gasps of breath after a kiss that would every now and then spark revolution in the movie’ (Billoch 1935: 22).

Kissing was germane to cinema. Getting to the heart of this matter was thus a mission of many Spanish film magazines as early as 1921 and still drew attention in 1936, which marked the end of the so-called Silver Age of Spanish cinema. Magazine articles on ‘los besos’ (kisses) were as ubiquitous as beauty secrets, star marriages, divorces and the wonders of technology. Articles about, as well as, photo montages and drawings of ‘los besos’ were repurposed and recycled in a range of cinema publications: Arte y Cinematografía, El Cine, Cinegramas, Cine Popular, Cine Sparta, Films Selectos, La Pantalla (see Figure 1.1), Popular Film, Proyector and Tararí. Reproductions of film posters and theatre listings in these magazines testified to the abundance of cinema content featuring a kiss. Filmgoers who had never left their towns were inundated with kissing scenes from Hollywood, French, German and other national cinemas.