Kiss On My List

Over the weekend I went and saw the screening of Letters to Juliet. I’m a hopeless romantic, following in the order of Nora Ephron, the Patron Saint of Rom-Com’s. Due to the lack of actual romance in my life, I get my fix from 80’s and 90’s staples as well as from some of the classics, The Apartment (“Shut up and deal,”) Roman Holiday and Sabrina.

Letters to Juliet begins with a lovely montage of classical art portraying The Kiss. Yes, The Kiss. Capital “T” Capital “K”. I immediately swooned, because, as noted above I’m a hopeless romantic. My hand goes to my cheek and my heart flutters. I’ve never looked at myself in a mirror while watching a romantic comedy but I’m pretty sure I blush as well. I literally can’t handle myself.

This got me thinking about a recent class I took talking about early film. One of the first films shown commercially to the public was called, The Kiss.  The Kiss (1896)  is 47 seconds long and was directed by William Heise for Thomas Edison. May Irwin and John Rice re-enact the final scene of the stage musical, The Widow Jones. The film was considered a scandal and one critic even wrote that “The spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other's lips was beastly enough in life size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting.” I guess someone didn’t have enough kisses in his life.

The Kiss was the most popular film produced in 1896 and in 1999 the Library of Congress deemed the short “culturally significant” and it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Admittedly, the kiss is slightly awkward and could use a crescendo that usually comes with a romantic soundtrack.  As the Edison catalog noted, “"They get ready to kiss, begin to kiss, and kiss and kiss and kiss in a way that brings down the house every time." Imagine how Victorian audiences would have reacted to the beach kiss in From Here to Eternity?

Watch The Kiss Here: The May-Irwin Kiss (Edison, 1896)
And just for the heck of it, here is the beach kiss in From Here to Eternity: YouTube - From Here to Eternity